


Stuck in the Middle (With You)

by emery_and_lead



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Human, Derek Hale/Erica Reyes - Freeform, Emotionally Constipated Derek, Erica Reyes/Stiles Stilinski - Freeform, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Infidelity, M/M, Minor Allison Argent/Scott McCall, Minor Vernon Boyd/Erica Reyes, Past Kate Argent/Derek Hale, Pining, Threesome-F/M/M (not endgame)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-11
Updated: 2015-03-22
Packaged: 2018-03-01 01:03:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 10
Words: 25,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2753768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emery_and_lead/pseuds/emery_and_lead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Hey, Der Bear," Laura says, flopping down at the foot of his bed. "I hear you're the resident scarlet letter of Beacon Hills High."</p>
<p>Everyone thinks Derek is Bad News, a hot mess, and maybe it's true. But he's also a dork who's watched Inception twelve times and buys all his favorite albums in vinyl and actually read <em>Frankenstein</em> while everyone else was busy Spark Noting it five minutes before the comprehension quiz. Derek doesn't <em>want</em> to hurt Stiles, doesn't <em>want</em> to leave him crying alone on the bleachers after Prom like all the Bad News boys in the movies, but Derek doesn't know how to be anything else.</p>
<p>[In which Derek and Stiles have sex through the transitive property.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This whole story is basically just a flashback to/a love affair with the Golden Days of Teen Wolf. This is my favorite group of characters and I love them best and I’m basically picking and choosing all my favorite bits of canon and splicing them together because it’s an AU and I totally can. 
> 
> That said, I don’t necessarily condone any of the behavior in this fic. Also, I own none of this. Obviously. Even the premise is blatantly and shamelessly stolen from The Middle Man by kabeyk, which is a really very old HP slash fic that is the first NC-17 fic I ever read and still dear to my heart. 
> 
> Also, this fic contains some three-way sex scenes. Just so y’all know. And we’re gonna pretend the Beacon Hills lacrosse bleachers are actually proper bleachers that provide some semblance of cover, not those flimsy little metal ones from the show that you can see right through. Like, lacrosse is the Beacon Hills version of football? Not with that seating, it’s not.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The week after Homecoming, on Tuesday afternoon, Stiles Stilinski's girlfriend goes down on Derek Hale under the lacrosse bleachers.

Derek’s back hits the bleachers with a snare-beat rattle. His head snaps back against the metal, and this was a bad idea, he knows that, but the hickey on her neck is still dark with the flush of blood, just slightly lopsided, and he can’t help but press his tongue to it. The skin there runs slightly warmer where her blood pumps close to the surface. He thinks he can see the outline of familiar teeth ringing its edges, and he traces it with his lips. He leans up to take her bottom lip between his teeth, knowing it’s not his to take.

Her thumbs dig into the hollows of his hipbones and he gasps against her ear. “This is just sex. That’s all,” he says, voice low and gruff as she grabs his shoulder to hike herself up higher. “I won’t say hi in the halls. You’re not going to sit with me at lunch.” He braces a steadying hand against the small of her back. “If that bothers you, we can stop.” 

She pulls back just far enough to show him the sharp edge of her smirk. A strand of hair sticks to the corner of her mouth where her lipstick smudged against his chin, but she doesn’t brush it away. “Awww, how _sweet_. I think that’s the most words anyone’s ever heard you say. And all to protect my honor.” She leans up to bite his mouth and murmurs, “Just get the fuck on with it. Fuck,” pulling at his shoulder where her hand’s still latched, sharp nails biting through the dark cotton of his T-shirt, until he gives in and leans down to scrape his teeth up her neck.

Her skin smells sweet, cherry blossom and roasted almonds, and he wants to bite at it until that sweetness is gone, until all he finds at the curve of her shoulder are the dark scents of sex and human musk.

She swats his head just hard enough to hurt. “Don’t leave any marks,” she whispers, breath hot against his earlobe. He can’t tell if the heat her words ignite in his gut is guilt or arousal when he imagines a row of neat teeth, smaller than his, peeking out from behind wide pink lips and scraping along that same stretch of skin. He drags the flat of his tongue over the soft line of her throat and feels like he’s chasing something.

Derek is supposed to be in Econ, and missing that class is basically a ticket on the fast track to a lifetime of detention, but he’s not worried. He could skip every class for the rest of the semester and Finstock wouldn’t dock him a single point, living in eternal hope that Derek will finally give into three years of pestering and grace the lacrosse field with his presence to score on an actual net, and not on his back under the bleachers. 

He has no idea where Erica’s supposed to be.

“Are you going to take your dick out or what?” she teases. With a coy glance through her lashes, she curls her fingers over his erection where it’s straining at the front of his jeans. “But I guess we can do it like this, too, if you want.”

She rubs at him, the pressure of her fingers skirting the edge of what he wants, almost enough. When he growls into her mouth and takes his hands off her ass to fumble with his fly, Erica grins and drops to her knees. 

“Look at you,” she says as she stares up at him, her smile and her pupils wide. Derek doesn’t know how her teeth can glint like that in the solid block of shade cast by the bleachers. He hadn’t noticed before how sharp they are. Feeling faintly uneasy, he considers telling her to put them away before she tries anything with her mouth around him, but he lets the strange sense of apprehension pass.

He rests a hand on her collarbone, thumb pressed along the line of her throat to feel her swallow. Brushing her hair back behind her shoulders, he holds it together against the nape of her neck with one hand, and tells himself it’s only because he wants to see her face.

…

The Beacon Hills High football team is a bad joke, and the Homecoming Game is the punch line: the stands a ghost town with no Clint Eastwood riding in to save the day and the players cast as tumbleweed, falling under tackle after tackle after tackle. But the Homecoming Dance is a different beast altogether.

Every year, the Student Council kids stand collapsible tables outside the lunchroom doors and call out to people as they come and go, dispensing bite-sized Halloween candy in exchange for slips of colored paper nominating members of the Homecoming Court. They jam all the votes in a big wooden box like real ballots to be counted by the Homecoming Committee.

At the dance itself, either the basketballers or the lax bros sneak a handle of cheap vodka into the Kool-Aid and Sprite concoction that passes for punch. Harris and Finstock feign ignorance, but last year lacrosse spiked it and Jackson goddamn Whittemore wouldn’t shut up about the extra suicides basketball had to suffer through while his team got two laps shaved off their warm-up.

The school organizes an annual after party at the movie theater in town, with free refills on flat fountain soda and day-old popcorn. Only the freshmen show up: the freshmen and any upperclassmen without an invitation to attend—or the initiative to crash—the big booze-soaked house party hosted by whichever rich kid with out-of-town parents has the biggest pool.

Derek has never gone to the Homecoming Dance, but every year for the past five, one of his sisters—Cora as a freshman last year and Laura for the four years before that—has dedicated the entire month of October to talking nonstop about the planning of it and, later, its execution. He could tell you every last detail, from who danced with whom to the color of the party streamers, and in all five years it’s never stopped feeling like a colossal waste.

It’s Wednesday, two days before the dance, and today is the last day to vote for members of the Homecoming Court. Derek only knows this because it says so on the big glittery eyesore of a poster taped to the front of the Homecoming Committee’s crappy table, borrowed from whoever organizes Freshman Welcome Week and the Ice Cream Social.

Cora stopped pestering him about voting on Monday after he knocked on her door to let her know dinner was ready. She’d been halfway through begging him to submit his vote, in between insulting his dearth of school spirit and his general intelligence; he growled and slammed her own bedroom door in her face. She hasn’t mentioned it since.

Sadly, Derek has never growled and slammed the door closed on Danny Mahealani, who’s smiling coyly and stepping out from behind the Homecoming Committee’s table, walking right towards Derek with a green slip of paper in one hand and a pen in the other. Even faced with Derek’s darkest glare, his steps don’t falter. If anything, his smile gets flirtier.

Derek just wants to get into the cafeteria so he can spend his lunch period in peace.

“Hey, Derek,” Danny says. His voice sounds deeper than it has any time Derek hears it from across the lunchroom, Danny arguing calmly with a decidedly less calm Jackson, methodically peeling the bologna off his cafeteria sandwich. Danny doesn’t flutter his eyelashes, or invade Derek’s personal space with a failed attempt at subtlety like Lydia Martin does, while coming on to him during any of her frequent though short-lived “breaks” with Jackson. Derek can appreciate that.

Danny is attractive, and Derek might consider the unspoken offer if he didn’t make a point never to hook up with any of the kids at Beacon Hills High. He prefers quick-and-dirty exchanges in dark corners and bathroom stalls: in back alleys behind The Jungle or any of Beacon County’s three heterosexual clubs, his twenty-dollar fake and a condom in his pocket, glitter clinging on his skin and eyelashes. Brief encounters, easily washed away and sent swirling down the drain along with the sparkles.

“You haven’t cast your vote yet,” Danny says, extending the paper and pen and still smiling. “You can nominate two guys and two girls. First choice gets two points, second choice gets one.”

Derek feels cornered. He keeps up the glare, but after several moments and an unfaltering smile from Danny, he sighs and takes the slip and the pen. Just to get it over with. Danny tucks a mini Snickers in the open breast pocket of his leather jacket, and Derek gives him another point for choosing that over one of the multicolored chocolate kisses dotting the candy bowl, although he doesn’t drop the glower. He turns around to brace the paper against the rough cinderblock wall and scribbles _Cora Hale_ and nothing else, folding the paper in half.

He thrusts it back at Danny and pushes his way into the cafeteria, through a flock of basketball players trundling along at a glacier’s pace. Danny just smiles and thanks him and returns to his metal folding chair, calling out to a group of girls gossiping just outside the cafeteria doors. Derek doesn’t fail to notice more people passing the table without voting, and while Danny calls out encouragements from his seat behind the table, Derek is the only one he stands up for. Derek’s not surprised.

After finally making safe passage into the cafeteria, he passes by Cora’s table and leans in close to whisper, “Don’t say I never did anything for you,” dangling the candy bar between two fingers as he walks backwards away from her table. She turns to look at him askance and he shakes the Snickers, raising his eyebrows and receiving a big grin and a thumbs up in return. Because Cora is a dork.

He rolls his eyes at her and spins to drop into his seat beside Boyd, at their usual table by the wall of windows. Boyd grunts a hello and nods at him. Derek nods back.

Derek’s attention is caught by a clatter from across the room, followed by laughter in three distinct voices, and he looks up to see Stiles Stilinski on his ass next to a fallen chair.

From the way he’s still splayed out half across the chair, it’s easy to picture the events leading up to his fall: chair tipped back on two legs, hands probably linked behind his head or folded across his chest—somewhere that made grabbing for the table difficult, when he inevitably lost his balance under the insistent pull of gravity. Or maybe the chair had begun to fold back in on itself, he thinks, noticing that Stiles was unfortunate enough to land with one of the ancient metal folding chairs the school only ever breaks out to accommodate lunchroom overflow.

He’d probably been smirking, the little shit, until the instant the chair began to give, and then his mouth would have fallen open, his eyes going wide and shocked; maybe he would have gasped out, just softly, legs stretching out in a last ditch effort to catch himself, and it would have been _so ho_ —

hilarious.

But the heap of boyish limbs and flannel that is Stiles only holds his attention for one drawn-out moment, before he realizes the third laughing voice mixed in with Scott McCall’s and Stiles’ own isn’t one he associates with their little two-man circus. Actually, it’s not a voice he recognizes at all. His gaze flits over to a blonde girl sitting opposite the lunch tray Stiles was eating off until he took his unfortunate tumble. She's holding her fork poised halfway between the tray and her mouth, head thrown back in laughter.

Jackson says something douchey to Stiles from his place several tables over—Derek can’t hear it, but he knows it’s douchey, partly because of the expression on his face—an ugly marriage of Schadenfreude and contempt—but mostly because Jackson is always saying douchey things.

But he’s not thinking about Jackson right now. The blonde girl has pushed herself upright, rounding the table and reaching down to help Stiles up while McCall continues to laugh down at him from the next chair over.

When Stiles is back on his feet she straightens his flannel over shirt, one hand tangled in each lapel, and reaches around to brush the dirt not entirely innocently from the ass of his jeans. Her hands linger for a moment and maybe they squeeze a little, too, although Derek can’t be sure from this angle. He feels heat creep up his neck. PDA has always made him uncomfortable. He blames a traumatic experience three years ago on the second floor landing of his house, with Laura and one of her boyfriends and a distinct absence of certain articles of clothing.

Derek turns to Boyd and asks casually, “Who’s that sitting with McCall and Stilinski?”

Boyd jerks his gaze toward Derek and away from where he, too, had been staring at Stiles’ table. If Derek didn’t know any better he’d say Boyd was fighting a blush. “Hm? Oh, that’s Erica Reyes.”

Derek’s eyes draw inexorably back to their table, where the blonde girl—Erica—has already returned to her seat as Stiles finishes righting his chair with a flourish. He flops down into it like a rag doll, lean gangly arms dangling over the sides of his chair and long legs stretched out beneath the table, crossed casually at the ankle, a dichotomy of awkward ease.

“She’s a junior. Pretty sure she and Stilinski are dating,” Boyd adds, picking distractedly at his pale, limp cafeteria chicken, strangely reluctant to meet Derek’s eyes. Then he looks over at the stretch of empty table in front of Derek and frowns. “You’re not eating?”

Derek shrugs and slouches further into his chair, tearing his eyes away from the table across the room. “I’m just gonna stop by McDonald’s during my free period.”

“Bring a chocolate shake to diversity lit for me?” Boyd asks hopefully. Boyd is a junior and Derek is a senior, but it’s an elective, and it’s the only class they share besides lunch period. Derek nods, crossing his arms over his chest, and firmly keeps his eyes away from where Erica and Stiles are grinning conspiratorially at each other over the table on the other side of the room.

…

Patrick is back for the weekend after his first month as a college junior, and he offered to help Mom with the dishes under the pretense of altruism. Really it’s because dish duty during visits was part of the price Derek and Cora set last year for their silence when Patrick “lost” the final report boasting failing grades in two of his 200 level courses.

Cora is parked in front of the television watching three insane spray-tanned assholes partying it up on Jersey Shore while Derek sits on the oversized armchair in the corner fucking around on his phone. If he pulls up the Facebook app to search Erica Reyes, it’s only because he’s curious.

He can hear Mom grilling Patrick about some girl in one of his Poli Sci major concentration courses who he’s “kind-of sort-of” seeing but definitely not bringing home, “now or maybe ever,” when Cora’s show cuts to commercials.

“So,” Derek says slowly as the Duracell rabbit hops across the screen in his peripheral vision. He pauses, looking down at his phone, at the pretty photograph Erica has set as her profile picture.

“What’s up, Grumpy Bear?”

Derek taps his phone against his thigh and says, “What do you know about Erica Reyes.”

“Erica,” says Cora, equally slowly, narrowing her eyes at him. She gets distracted for a moment, grimacing and hitting mute when the Old Spice guy comes on, flexes his muscles and tries to tell them what their man could smell like. “Why?”

Derek shrugs. “I don’t think I’ve ever noticed her before lunch yesterday.”

The clatter of porcelain on metal sounds through the kitchen doorway: a plate falling into the stainless steel sink, Mom flicking water and soap suds at Patrick in playful reprimand like she always does in near-miss situations involving the less expensive flatware, making him laugh out loud in sharp contrast to Cora’s sudden annoyed frown. “Of course you haven’t.”

“What’s _that_ supposed to mean?” Derek asks, sitting forward in his chair and meeting Cora’s scowl with a glare of his own, their stares matched inch for angry inch. Laura is the one with the magic stare that can cow anyone into submission—Derek, and Cora, and even Patrick who’s one year older—with the fury in her gaze. Derek and Cora can stay locked in stalemate for hours and come out at the end with no one the victor.

Cora nearly growls out the words when she finally speaks. “It means, of _course_ Derek Hale doesn’t notice fat, pimply Erica Reyes with the seizures who doesn’t wear makeup. But he sure as hell notices her when she gets a miracle treatment and a makeover and suddenly turns hot.”

“I don’t really like _anyone_ , hot or not,” Derek says irritably, and reluctantly breaks away from Cora’s gaze to retrieve his phone from the rug where it fell, forgotten, from his knee as he leaned forward into Cora’s challenge.

“Yeah, but you _notice_ them,” Cora huffs. Underneath the anger, there’s the hint of something softer: something a little sad. Derek looks at her for a second, head cocked to the side.

He stands up and crosses to the couch where she’s sitting, throwing himself down with half of his body on top of her, and he feels the air leave her in a rush when his shoulder presses a little too hard into her stomach. 

He eases up enough to let her breathe and she shrieks in his ear, shoving at his head. “Ugh, Derek, get off,” she whines, and he smirks and shifts around, pulling at her arms and trying to get comfortable, until she gives up and settles a hand in his hair, tugging in gentle reproach.

The remote is still sitting on the coffee table when Jersey Shore starts up again, and Derek stretches his leg out to unmute it, pressing the button with his big toe.

“You are such a weirdo,” Cora says, but all the bite is gone from her voice and she pokes him fondly on the nose.

“Hm,” Derek says agreeably as the camera zooms in on one of the shirtless guys onscreen, grinding with an orange-tinged girl in a chaotic floral dress that clashes with her tan. “So who’s that guy?”

Normally, Derek would rather shoot himself in both feet twice than listen to the pathetic details of Pauly D’s wasted life and completely inexplicable wealth. But with Cora, this is what forgiveness looks like.

By the time the show ends, they’ve swapped roles, Derek sitting up straight with his feet up on the coffee table and Cora curled against his side, cheek pressed to his shoulder. “You did vote for me, right?” she asks, swinging her legs out from underneath her and turning the TV off with her own toes.

“You are such a weirdo,” Derek parrots, straight-faced, and she pokes him in the ribs.

“Did you?”

He flops sideways across the couch, his head hitting the armrest, and slings his feet up into Cora’s lap. “Do you think if I only put one person she’ll get all six points?” he asks, glancing over at her; she laughs and pats his shin and lets him keep his legs draped over her knees until Patrick comes and makes them both scoot over.

…

Cora looks beautiful in a dark blue dress, earrings and necklace matching her strappy silver heels, curling wisps of hair falling softly beneath the delicate French braid Mom spent two hours fixing into a perfect crown. Her date drives up in his father’s car, a little battered and in need of a good wash, but it’s a nice enough model, and after Mom takes ten million photographs and tries to pretend she’s not crying (she cries every year, and every year she tries to hide it), Derek waits until he can pull the guy aside. Patrick is still home, but Patrick is a soft touch, so Derek is the one who corners Cora’s date in the hallway and threatens death and disembowelment, among myriad other horrors, if this doesn’t turn out to be the best night of his sister’s life thus far.

She hugs him before she leaves, whispering, “Don’t think I don’t know what you said to him,” and “thank you.” Grabbing his head so he can’t squirm away, she plants a giant sloppy kiss on his cheek. He frowns and scrubs his face with the back of his hand while she laughs and reaches into her silver clutch to fix her lipstick where it smudged against his face.

And then the guy drives off, Derek’s baby sister in the passenger seat, his mom standing beside him on the stoop and trying not to let anyone see the way she’s sniffling a little and blinking a lot.

Derek does his homework, plays two hours of Halo and goes to bed, and that’s how he spends his last Homecoming Night.

…

Cora apparently thinks Stiles and Erica are the cutest couple ever to cute, according to her commentary the day after Homecoming while she and Derek sit in front of the TV not watching the Discovery Channel. The show’s about turtles, and Derek thinks it’s fascinating, how they’re all extremes—speeding through the ocean but struggling to navigate the earth; dying before they’ve had a chance to feel the very water they were born to love, or else living long enough to see a whole generation of humans come and go—but Cora only wants to watch Animal Planet when something’s getting killed gruesomely, and if nothing on screen’s being mauled she’ll attack Derek to balance it out. Really, it’s no wonder she likes Jersey Shore.

She’s scrubbed her face clean of makeup, knotted her hair up in a messy bun, lounging in worn flannel PJ pants and one of Patrick’s college sweatshirts she must have swiped from his suitcase. Derek still thinks she’s beautiful, even if he’d never say it out loud. Sometimes, he wakes up terrified from nightmares full of fire, where she was in the house two years ago with Papa—her or Laura or Patrick or Mom—and in those moments he hates himself for that, for not telling her and all of them every time he sees them, _you’re so beautiful, God, I love you so much. Don’t ever leave._

“They are so adorable,” she sighs, and Derek rolls his eyes. She pokes him in the hip with her bare toes and grimaces at him when he looks up. “You’re just the Grinch. Too grumpy-growly to let yourself believe in truuuue lurve.”

Derek shoves her shoulder, barely hard enough to budge her sideways, and she laughs at the sour expression on his face. She reaches out to tousle his hair and he bats her hand away, trying to smooth out the cowlick she kicked up on the back of his head.

“One day, young grasshopper, you will be a real boy and know true love’s kiss.”

Derek only glares harder. “You’re mixing metaphors.”

Cora fakes a gasp and clutches both hands over her heart. The sleeves of her stolen hoodie slide down her forearms to pool at the crooks of her elbows, and for a moment she looks startlingly young; for a moment Derek forgets what he’s done, forgets to hate himself, and that’s why he loves talking to Cora, that’s why he acts like a child around her, all teasing banter and thoughtless physical affection. “Oh, God, you’re right. I’m a monstrous butcher of the English language, I should be burned at stake as the clock strikes noon.”

Derek growls low in his throat and tackles her back against the couch. She doesn’t stop laughing even when he accidentally elbows her in the kidney.

…

On Monday, Stiles and Erica don’t show up to lunch, and McCall sits awkwardly by himself at their usual table, Allison Argent sending him sympathetic, lost-puppy looks from where she’s sitting next to Jackson and Lydia. Boyd and Derek talk some about their plans for Halloween, how Derek is expected at home to help set up and staff Hale’s Haunted House of Horrors, an old tradition started by his great grandfather, where Mom turns their entire house into something dark and cold out of a slasher flick from the age of the Silver Screen, an abandoned asylum or theater or hospital full of the dead and the undead.

It’s separated into two routes, one of them kid-friendly and the other legitimately terrifying. Nearly everyone in Beacon Hills stops by, even the disenchanted high schoolers who have ragers to attend and pranks to execute, because it’s the coolest thing Halloween in Beacon Hills has to offer. The only thing considered scarier than Hale’s Haunted House of Horrors is the midnight tour of the Preserve lead in groups by plainclothed members of the Beacon Hills Police Department and Alan Deaton, who knows all the chilling legends centered around those woods and has the perfect voice for scary stories: deep and calm and grave.

Stiles never does make it to lunch, and between his absence and Derek’s conversation with Boyd, he can’t help thinking how he never sees Stiles on Halloween. While Derek has to help out with the haunted house, Stiles has to help his dad and the deputies with the midnight tour, and their paths have never crossed.

Derek doesn’t see Stiles at all in school that day, or Erica, but that makes sense; they are a sophomore and a junior, respectively, and Derek is a senior, so they don’t share any classes. And it’s not like they ever talk to each other anyway.

He sees Erica in the parking lot after school, and he means to pass her right by, to climb into his Camaro and swing around front to pick up Cora so they can head home, but he finds himself stopping to say hi. Hello turns into flirting, and this isn’t what Derek was trying to do, it really isn’t, but Erica has a hickey on the side of her neck and she and Stiles weren’t at lunch today and he just can’t help himself, can’t fight against it when he leans in towards her, smiles a little wider than he ever does for real.

…

On Tuesday, he and Erica have sex.

…

They’re lying down under the bleachers to catch their breath, Derek with his fly zipped but his belt still undone, Erica in a hot pink bra with her shirt off. If the hickey on her neck is a little darker than it was this morning, having half-healed after a full night of sleep, well. Maybe Stiles won’t notice.

Erica props herself up on one elbow and leans over Derek, a worried line creasing her brow. “You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?” she asks, biting her lip. “I mean, I like Stiles. He’s a… well, he’s not a _nice_ guy—he’s kind of an asshole—but he is a _good_ guy. I don’t want to do that to him.”

Derek stares back at her for a moment, feeling his mouth twitch down at the corners. “I’m not doing this because I want to fuck Stiles over. Or you. I told you, it’s just sex.”

Erica nods slowly and leans down to rest her cheek against his chest. This is just sex. It’s just sex, they can’t hurt each other, so Derek wonders why he feels the sudden desire, like a punch in the stomach, to push her away from him, to buckle his belt and take off his boots and run and run and run. Run far away from this grass beneath these bleachers, where the last tiny remnants of the sex they just had mingle with lingering remnants of the sex a hundred different people have had in this very spot: drops of long-dried come and spit and sweat, long strands of girls’ hair and short curling pubes, threads and buttons and regret. And it all feels like such a colossal waste.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know it's a little bit short, but this just felt like the right place to break it off.

After the third time Derek has sex with Erica, they’re sitting propped up against the brick side of the school building, clothes back in order but hair still tangled up in wild disarray. She pulls a crafty pack of cigarettes from the top of her boot and sets one between her lips. Derek can see her lipstick smearing against the bleach white paper, leaving a smudged circle of pink to ring the filter as she shifts it around, until it’s dangling from her lower lip to improve the aesthetic.

Erica’s beauty is precise, deliberate, _manufactured_. She’s always hyperaware of her body and how she’s holding it: the way she flips her hair behind her shoulder and taps her nails against the desks, how it all fits together into something picturesque and stunning. Even when they’re having sex, writhing hot and wet together, she only ever moves the way she wants to.

She pulls a lighter from her bra—Derek had wondered why she wouldn’t let him take it off—and when she lifts it to the cigarette and spins the flint, Derek reaches over to flick the lid shut, blinking the flame out of existence.

“Don’t do that in front of me,” he says, because he can handle smelling the smoke where it clings to her clothes and her hair and her skin—suffers through it, sometimes has to take his mouth away from her neck to breathe in clean air for fear of hyperventilating, of choking on the lingering scent of ash and his own unwanted memories—but this is too much.

She shrugs and taps the cigarette back into its carton, slipping the lighter in to nestle between her breasts, wedging the cigarettes between her calf and the leather of her boot.

She tilts her head back until it hits the brick, staring up toward the high tree line at the edge of the property. “You know,” she says, the bare edge of a laugh in her voice, “I had such a crush on Stiles, back when I was—back before.” She sighs to herself, pursing her lips as though imagining cigarette smoke spilling out between them. “But now, I’m not fat anymore. I’m not ugly, or pimply, and I realized… I liked Stiles because he seemed like the only thing I could ever hope to have. Now, I’m… well. I think I can raise the bar a little,” she says, and slants her eyes coyly sideways in Derek’s direction.

Derek doesn’t know why he feels a spark of misplaced anger at her words. He thinks it must be jealousy, but what right does he have to feel jealous? This is just sex, and Stiles is Erica’s boyfriend, which isn’t a position Derek’s ever wanted for himself.

…

Derek thought he might feel different, after he started having sex with Erica—started having sex with someone else’s girlfriend. He’d thought the constant thrum of guilt might be enough to drive him to distraction, in the beginning, torturing him the way all of his fresh betrayals do. But nothing really changes.

He wakes up, jerks off in the shower, brushes his hair and his teeth; lets Mom give him a kiss on the cheek as he passes through the kitchen, drives his Camaro to school with Cora tucked sleepily in the passenger side; dodges Finstock when he tries to catch him in the hallway outside Spanish for his daily lacrosse proposition, goes to class, eats lunch with Boyd; brings Cora back home at the end of the day except on Mondays and Wednesdays when she has band practice, does his homework, goes to bed; goes to clubs on the weekend, dances with unfamiliar girls and lean boys with short hair and long legs: and the only difference is, in between lunch with Boyd and sliding into the Camaro at the end of the day, he sometimes has sex with Erica. He doesn’t feel much different at all, but he supposes he’s gotten used to hating himself by now.

…

His routine breaks on Wednesday, after eight days and his fifth round of illicit sex with Erica. Everything changes on Wednesday, because on Wednesday, Stiles finds out.

Derek is at his locker, switching his Spanish notes out for Physics, when a voice behind him calls out, “Hey! Hey, Derek!” and when Derek turns around he comes face to face with Stiles. He stares at Stiles for a moment and forces his expression to maintain a careful neutral. When it’s straight, his face unnerves people: the heavy brow, the set of his mouth, the way it’s hard to tell the exact color of his eyes.

He’s helpless to stop his gaze darting down toward Stiles’ throat when it bobs nervously, but Stiles crosses his arms and squares his shoulders, an innocent, brave tilt to his chin. Derek raises his eyebrows.

“You’re having sex with Erica, aren’t you,” he says, and it’s not really a question even if it’s phrased like one. Derek cocks his head to the side, assessing, then nods. No use denying it; it’s obvious he already knows.

Stiles opens his mouth as though to respond, but he falters abruptly. His gaze flicks up and down Derek’s body, mouth set in a confused moue until he opens it again and it stays like that, soft lips parted.

Derek cants one eyebrow, knowing the way the rest of his face stays perfectly still is the most unsettling thing of all. When Stiles only continues to stare, Derek holds his eye roll in check and asks, voice flat save a bare hint of menace for effect, “Does this conversation have a purpose?”

“I… yeah,” Stiles says, and pauses, letting his arms fall from their defensive position over his chest. “I just didn’t expect you to admit it so easily. You kind of knocked me off my game, dude,” he admits, rubbing an awkward hand over the back of his head.

Derek can feel his lip curling a little in distaste. Though Stiles flinches back, it’s barely perceptible. “Don’t call me dude.”

Stiles’ mouth falls open wider still, brow drawing down as his eyes narrow. “You’re having sex with my girlfriend, yet you’re getting all pissy over me calling you ‘dude?’ How does that even make sense?” Derek glares at him. Stiles calls it and raises him a dramatic eye roll, the flush of righteous anger apparently steamrolling over the last of his apprehension at approaching Derek. “Fine, fine. I’ll just call you douchecanoe, then, I mean, it’s much more accurate, anyway; a name befitting an asshole girlfriend-thief. I mean, it would be totally helpful if people just called their kids what they are, that way no one would bother with any of the Shitheads or Assholes or Murderers of the world, because they’d know right away what shitheads and assholes and murdering murderers they are. I think that would be easier, why does no one do that? I think the Native Americans did, right, why can’t we be more like them, they knew what’s up.”

“Still not seeing the purpose,” Derek says, and starts to turn around. Stiles grabs him by the shoulder and he halts, his body still angled away.

Derek slowly looks down at Stiles’ hand where it rests, pale against the black leather; he feels his eyes grow dark and intent, and he thinks his nostrils might flare a little, as a flash of what might be anger or might be something else comes alight in his stomach. Stiles takes one look at Derek’s face, then down at his hand, where his fingers are pressed into Derek’s jacket, and drops it like it’s hot.

Derek pauses and finally meets Stiles’ eyes. “I have to get to physics.”

“Hey, no, wait, I just wanted to ask…” he trails off and just keeps looking at Derek, his face falling.

And there’s the guilt Derek’s been missing this past week, flooding through him and searing like fire: like a poisonous lover’s touch. “What?”

Stiles hesitates. “Why?” he finally says, and it comes out quieter than he probably meant it to, his eyes big and round and pleading.

Derek has no idea why his gut seems to twist in on itself, like muscles contracting in spastic motion after a sucker punch to the stomach. He forces the edge of panic away and says, affecting carelessness, “She’s hot. She wants me,” and shrugs like his heart isn’t hammering away at his ribs.

Stiles’ face falls further, crumpling in on itself, and Derek feels a hysterical laugh bubble up in his throat out of nowhere. He chokes it down without trying to seem like that's what he’s doing.

Stiles takes a deep breath, and Derek watches his chest rise and fall.

“I… Look. She’s the first real girlfriend I’ve ever had. I mean, there was this other girl—okay, yeah, it was Lydia, you probably know that, everybody knows that—but I, I liked her, for a really long time, right, and I’ve, like, just barely gotten over her and Erica likes me and she’s pretty and I really… I’ve never had anything like this before. It’s, I like it,” Stiles finishes lamely. His hands fall to his sides, swinging down away from where they’d been moving in front of him, aimlessly animated. Derek stares at them for a moment, feeling off-balance at how unnaturally still they seem, hanging there.

Derek has no clue what to say. So instead he stands there staring like an idiot. Even the dissonant clang of the warning bell doesn’t jolt him out of it.

Stiles starts to fidget as Derek’s silence stretches on, until he finally throws his hands up. Derek breathes out slowly as Stiles flails. “So?”

His equilibrium restored, Derek feels confident enough to put a bit more menace behind his words. He leans forward into the very edge of Stiles’ personal space. “So what.”

“So, are you going to keep having sex with her?” Stiles asks, and his voice is too loud in the silence of the mostly empty hallway, the tardy bell just seconds from sounding over the loudspeakers.

Derek considers him for a moment, Stiles still fidgeting under his gaze, and then asks, voice quieter than it’s been any other time he’s spoken, “Would you break up with her if I did?”

Stiles stares at him for a moment, open-mouthed, and Derek stares right back. Finally, he huffs out an angry breath and spins sharply on his heel, stomping away without a backwards glance, just as the sound of the last bell rings out through the hallway. Derek stands there staring after him until he rounds the corner.

He’s late for Physics already. It doesn’t matter.

…

On the way to school the next day, Cora nudges him across the center console. “Thanks again, for voting me into Homecoming Court.”

“Cora. That was _weeks_ ago.”

She shrugs and sits back again, propping her head against the passenger side window. “I know. I’m just… I’m sorry for bugging you about it so much. I know how you feel about Homecoming,” she adds quietly, sending him a careful glance from the corner of her eye.

Derek’s hands tighten infinitesimally on the steering wheel and he keeps his eyes trained firmly on the road ahead. He slows the car as they roll over a speed bump on the street leading up to the school and murmurs, “Yeah. No problem. Couldn’t have some other asshole beat you out by two points.”

She grins over at him.

“Shut up,” he says. He doesn’t say, “I think I might be breaking up your cutest couple ever to cute.”

That doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

…

He and Cora separate to head for class, and when he casts a subtle glance over at Stiles and Erica’s table during lunch, only to see a big, bruise-dark hickey he’s sure he didn’t put there peeking noticeably from the collar of her blouse, he knows it’s a statement: the answer to his question. He doesn’t think he should be as pleased about that as he is.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another short one. It's unlikely any future chapters will be as long as the first one, but they'll probably be longer than this. 
> 
> In this chapter you will find ~~angst~~ introspection, and confrontation #2.

Derek isn’t the kind of boy any parent wants for their child, but he’s the kind of boy all their children want, anyway: the bad boy with the sexy black sports car and the leather jacket, and shoulders broader than any that belong on an eighteen-year-old boy.

He had an innocent face back then, in the nebulous “before.” His features were soft around the edges; he had big ears and bunny teeth, eyebrows that stuck up in little rabbit-tail tufts above the bridge of his nose. He’s always been quiet, but it used to be a light bashful shyness, not this looming, silent aura of danger. He can’t help but think it’s his own fault, a hardening in his body to parallel the death of anything gentle inside him: his now-stoic face clashing with the quietly pleased half-smile in photographs from his childhood, like Dorian Gray in reverse.

He wonders how this fresh sin will manifest in his features, what he’ll see in the mirror next time he looks—what new harsh line or corner will remind him of this mistake he’s walked into willingly, with eyes wide open.

Derek _knows_ he doesn’t have the healthiest relationship with sex, and he knows why. Of course he does. But he doesn’t make excuses for anyone: not for the people who’ve hurt him, and certainly not for himself.

He keeps doing it. He’s never really known how to stop. He’d wanted to stop so badly, after _her_ , but he just kept falling back into it again and again, inevitably, like a lodestone. It was a persistent itch under his skin, a fire in his bones.

That sounds like an excuse, but it’s not. It doesn’t change anything, doesn’t make it all right. So he’d made a vow to himself. Never again would he let himself stand as a variable on either side of that toxic equation: after all, if you don’t let the knife in, nobody gets hurt when it twists.

…

Lydia Martin saunters up to Derek in the hallway outside AP Gov, stopping him with one perfectly manicured hand on the center of his chest. He can see Jackson scowling at him and lurking unsubtly by the bank of lockers across the hall. Derek fights an eye roll, because that tends to detract from his overall aura of stay-the-fuck-away. Apparently rolling your eyes is a sign of everyday human weakness, of approachability, and Derek does not want to seem approachable. For his sake and everyone else’s.

Lydia smiles up at him with her perfect teeth and those sweet dimples that bely the cold, calculating edge to her stare, but Derek has trained himself to look past pleasant masks at the real person underneath. That glint in her eye spells danger.

“Hi, _Derek_ ,” she says sweetly, fingers contracting just slightly, until the sharp hint of fingernails catch like claws against his shirt.

Derek has no real experience interacting with Lydia outside these flirty advances, always during her and Jackson’s “breaks” and always clearly televised where Jackson is well within earshot and eye range—it’s all so obvious and so very high school, a shallow ploy to plant the seed of jealousy that never fails to lead Jackson right back into her waiting arms. She’s popular, but that’s not something Derek cares enough to track, and there’s only one other time she’s ever made a clear, long-standing impression on him.

She and Jackson had been on a break again, but it had only happened that morning. It was exciting enough in its newness—Lydia still reveling in the attention stirred by the breakup—that she wasn’t yet worried about taking steps toward convincing or conning Jackson into taking her back. She’d been standing by the lockers speaking with one of the girls on the cheerleading squad when Stiles scrambled over to fumble through a declaration of—love, adoration, horniness, whatever—and she had turned away from her friend, looked him in the eye, opened her mouth, and shot him down in front of an entire hallway full of people.

Derek steps away so that her hand falls from his chest. He raises his eyebrows at her, and her smile dims a little. Usually, he doesn’t respond at all to her overtures, even to back away.

He turns and walks away, Lydia calling, “I’ll see you later,” toward his retreating back, and he’s sure he’d see a coy smile curling across her face if he bothered to glance back. As he turns the corner he wonders if maybe he should have taken her up on the offer, just this once. Lydia is, for the moment, unattached, and he doesn’t owe Erica anything. He doesn’t want to get stuck on one girl, like a broken record always skipping back to the same place, never moving forward or breaking away.

He doesn’t like Lydia. But she’s hot and she wants to use him, and hadn’t he told Stiles that’s what drew him to Erica? Turning around now, marching back there and giving Lydia what she wants would make perfect sense.

Derek continues on his way.

…

He has sex with Erica three more times before Stiles confronts him again. He’d expected nothing less.

“Did I do something to, like, mortally offend you?” Stiles asks, planting himself directly in Derek’s path. They stop and stand like rocks in a river, people flowing around them, bumping them from all sides, fighting through the crowd on the way to their classrooms.

Derek sighs and counts to ten in his head. He’s going to be late for physics again. “What are you talking about?”

Stiles huffs a frustrated sigh and throws his hands up in the air. “Why are you trying to get Erica to dump me? I mean, do you just hate me for no reason?”

“I’m not—”

“Oh, you most certainly are,” Stiles says, cutting Derek off mid-sentence.

Derek growls and takes one menacing step closer, looming into Stiles’ personal space. “Who the fuck are you to tell me what _I_ want?”

“Dude, please. ‘She’s hot, she wants me, blah blah”—look, I’m not _stupid,_ okay? There are, like, a million other hot girls, why else would you choose her if you’re not trying to get her to upgrade—trade me in for a nicer model, aka you? She obviously likes you better.”

“She does?” Derek asks, surprised. She’s not dating Derek, after all. Besides, Derek is an asshole, and they both know it; everyone knows it.

Stiles flails his arms around, face twisted in long-suffering annoyance and tinged with something sadder: something almost longing. “Of _course_ she does. I mean, look at you. You’re… you.” He gestures expansively at Derek’s chest, adding a little flail at the end for emphasis.

“You,” Derek starts, and he can feel the furrow form between his eyebrows as they draw together.

Laura used to love making him frown. She’s told him time and again that, when his brow furrows, his eyebrows look like two wooly caterpillars crawling together across his forehead to meet in the middle and kiss. Boyd says they look like storm clouds coming together to rain death and destruction. Then again, Boyd didn’t know him when he was twelve and his eyebrows still grew in fluffy tufts above his nose.

“Don’t think of it like that,” Derek says, and curses the way his voice comes out soft.

Stiles doesn’t seem to notice. With a loud, obnoxious snort, he says, “Oh, really, well, how should I look at it, then? I must not be giving her what she needs, if she’s looking somewhere else.” He sighs and rakes a tired hand through his hair, closing his eyes and breathing out slowly. “I don’t know,” he says, opening his eyes again. “Maybe I should just bow out gracefully, here.”

“It’s just sex,” Derek says, and he’s tired of having to say it, over and over again, to Erica and to himself and now to Stiles. He just wants everything not to take so much effort; _just sex_ is supposed to make things easier.

“What,” Stiles says, face blank as he stares up at Derek, although Derek suddenly registers the fact that he doesn’t have to stare very far up at all, standing only an inch or two below Derek’s own six feet.

“Me and Erica. It’s just sex, that’s it. I don’t want to date her.”

He’d thought that might mean something to Stiles, but he just crosses stiff arms over his chest. His mouth twists into a bitter smile as he says, “What, is that supposed to make me feel better?” and snorts derisively. “Pretty cold comfort.”

Derek wants to stomp his foot against the ugly hallway tiles, wants to yell at Stiles that he doesn’t get it, he doesn’t _understand_ , but instead he forces himself to shrug. “Just because I’m having sex with her doesn’t mean you have to break up with her.”

Stiles stares at him for a moment, openmouthed, then slowly shakes his head and lets his arms fall to his sides. “Man, your life is screwed up,” he says, and turns to walk away. Derek lets him leave, and keep the last word, too, mostly because he knows if he opens his mouth the only thing that’s likely to come out is, “Tell me about it,” and while he’s not interested in self-delusion, that kind of open honesty only ever leads to trouble.

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we discover that the problems in Derek’s past didn’t stay there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just got out on winter break, so hopefully I'll continue pounding this puppy out—pun definitely, definitely intended—as quickly as I have been. This chapter is a little longer than the last couple.

It probably has the opposite affect than intended when Stiles starts flaunting Erica just a little more deliberately: a possessive hand at the small of her back as they walk into and out of the cafeteria; long, wet kisses in the hallways whenever Derek is within view, full of tongue and dirty enough to earn wolf whistles from people as they pass. The marks on her neck get bigger, darker, a little bit harder to hide. It reminds Derek, oddly, of the way Lydia puts her hands on his arms, his chest, when she knows Jackson’s watching and seething from the sidelines.

The thing is, it feels like a challenge. Stiles is staking his claim, marking his territory, but Derek wants to have someone that belongs to Stiles. Derek likes kissing over the bruises on her neck and knowing he’s not the one who put them there.

Erica notices.

She has her hands braced up against the side of the old shed where Finstock keeps the lacrosse gear during the offseason. The shoddy paint job is flaking in places. Bits of it rub off against her palms as they slide up and down with Derek’s every full-body thrust, his chest slamming her shoulder blades forward and forcing her hands to shift.

Fingers firm around her hips, thumbs digging hard into the dimples at the base of her spine, he lifts her a little off the ground with each thrust. Derek fits his mouth right over the hickey that darkens the bone at the point of her shoulder, trying to line the contours up just right, and she turns her head slightly to laugh, breathless, in his ear.

“You get off on fucking someone who’s with somebody else, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Derek mutters with a quick, jerky nod. It’s true enough, but it’s not the whole truth. He doesn’t elaborate, though; he doesn’t owe Erica anything.

“Yeah,” she says, and Derek doesn’t know if she’s mocking him or agreeing, so he bends his knees a little to change the angle. “Yeah,” she repeats, and this time it’s all desire, so he counts it as a win and steadies his hands around her waist.

His lips are still fastened to her shoulder when he comes, and he feels his teeth sink in, knowing the mark will grow darker still, and runs his tongue over it one more time as Erica shudders in his hands.

…

Derek really should have seen this coming. Erica still has no idea Stiles knows about what’s going on between her and Derek, which is an oversight on her part. She ought to know Stiles isn’t an idiot.

Erica hasn’t figured it out, but that doesn’t mean anything really. She and Stiles only just started dating. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that Stiles Stilinski and Scott McCall tell each other everything, and it’s equally inherent that both of them would go to war and take an entire barrage of bullets for one another. Derek’s kicking himself now, for not realizing that Stiles would tell McCall—for not considering that McCall would take on Derek’s wrath in a heartbeat to defend his best friend.

He’s stopped in the hallway once again by a firm hand landing on his shoulder. With the assumption that it’s Stiles, he turns around on a sigh, mouth already open, ready to head Stiles’ customary word-vomit off at the pass. Instead of a verbal avalanche, he gets a literal punch in the face.

Derek stumbles a little, but doesn’t give much ground. He may not play basketball or lacrosse like Harris and Finstock have been begging him to do since he first stepped foot in the school, redoubling their efforts after he hit that growth spurt between sophomore and junior year, but he sets a punishing regiment of push-ups, pull-ups and leg work for himself, and Scott is roughly half his size. He has a good, solid stance, though, and the angle is perfectly calculated for maximum pain but minimum structural damage.

The lights overhead spin a little, bright spots dancing in flashes across Derek’s retinas. His lip splits against McCall’s knuckles, and when he raises his head, he sucks it between his teeth to clear the blood away. The taste of iron tangs sharply on his tongue and he winces as it throbs along with the beat of his heart. It probably won’t do much more than swell, and maybe darken to purple-black, depending on how hard it caught against his teeth.

Derek takes a deep breath and lets it slowly out through his nose. “You’re lucky I’m not a big enough asshole to punch you back.”

“But you are a big enough asshole to steal someone else’s girl?” Scott asks, stepping forward into Derek’s space and pressing his face aggressively close, their noses nearly knocking.

Derek raises his eyebrows and shifts back just barely, crossing his arms as he does, to disguise the concession inherent in the motion. “I didn’t realize girls could belong to people,” he says severely, and McCall flushes a dull, angry red.

“That’s not what I meant and you fucking know it. You’re just trying to turn this around on me, and that’s not gonna happen. Back the fuck off Erica.”

Derek tilts his head slightly, as though considering, and then says slowly, stressing every syllable, “I don’t think I will.”

McCall looks like he’s winding up to throw another punch, but that’s when Stiles comes running pell-mell through a growing throng of onlookers and right into the middle of things. “Scott! Scott, hey, man, don’t. He’s not worth it,” he says, wedging himself between them and pressing Scott gently away with a hand on his shoulder. Derek glares at McCall over the top of Stiles’ head, and Scott glares right back, pushing forward against the hand Stiles has braced over his breastbone in warning, until Stiles grabs him by the other shoulder and shakes him a little. “Scott, _stop_ , c’mon.”

“You didn’t have to sic your attack dog on me,” Derek says to Stiles, though his eyes never leave Scott’s.

McCall actually _growls_ , lunging forward with a furious light in his eyes. Stiles shoves him back again, harder this time, both hands in the center of his chest. “ _Go,_ ” he says, but McCall only stands there, muscles tense, and glances indecisively between Derek and Stiles. Stiles nudges him again, gently this time, fingertips pressing against his upper arm. “Go. I’ll handle it.”

After one last assessing glance between them, McCall turns around, grumbling and stomping down the hallway. When he disappears into the stream of students trying to beat the first bell, Stiles whips back around to pin Derek with a glare so thunderous he almost takes a step back, catching himself at the last second.

“Jesus,” Stiles says, throwing his arms wide like a man at prayer, “Look, I know you think you’re hot shit—”

“ _What_ ,” Derek says dangerously, taking one menacing step closer to Stiles.

Stiles flinches back a little, even as he rolls his eyes. “Okay, no, seriously, don’t give me the Murder Eyebrows of Doom—patent pending—like I’m spreading lies about you or something, because dude: I’m onto you. I mean, you think you’re too cool for _Homecoming_ , like you’re somehow above the skinny peons who stoop so low as to actually _have fun_.”

Derek feels suddenly like his blood is boiling under his skin. He shoves forward roughly until Stiles is backed up against the bank of lockers on the far wall and crowds in until he can feel Stiles’ breath against the bridge of his nose. He leans in, mouth brushing the shell of Stiles’ ear, and feels Stiles shiver against his chest where they’re almost touching. “I fucked your girlfriend during free period yesterday,” he whispers, and feels Stiles still against him. “I held her up against the wall of the equipment shed and took her from behind, and she still had that hickey you gave her on the side of her neck, but she was screaming for _me_. And after, I sucked a mark right on top of yours.”

He finishes speaking and the hallway is silent as the dead, not a soul in sight. At Stiles’ quick indrawn breath, Derek drags himself away, stepping to the side.

Stiles breaks free and turns to face him, almost stumbling as he retreats to the other side of the hallway, back bumping up against the opposite wall. A poster behind him crinkles, one of its edges tearing free of the tape, and when he steps away it folds in on itself. He’s staring at Derek, eyes wide. His face is flushed dark red; he’s humiliated and confused and helplessly turned on. Derek can see it in the width of his pupils, the pace of his breath.

“Fuck you, man,” Stiles says, voice shaking. “ _Fuck you_.”

He picks his backpack up off the floor where Derek hadn’t even realized he’d dropped it, and he barely has it slung over one shoulder before he’s off like a shot down the hallway, moving at a near-sprint. Derek’s stomach heaves.

He crosses to the trash can outside the men’s bathroom and has to take several deep breathes to choke the bile back down, bent double over the bin, hands gripping the sides so hard his knuckles turn white. When he can move without fresh bile crawling up his throat anew, Derek shoves away from the trash can, stalks down the hallway, and pushes out through the front doors. He crosses the parking lot, slams into his Camaro, and drives.

…

Derek has no idea what he’s doing.

That’s not precisely true. Derek knows what this is. He’s not in the business of lying to himself, but he’s well versed in the art of sucking it up and dealing with it.

He fucks Erica again, against the back wall of the school, where anyone could see them if they bothered to look out the windows or out across the baseball field where the stoners go to light up.

This time, when he fixes his mouth over a blood-dark bruise on the back of her neck—left behind by Stiles’ teeth, his lips, his _tongue_ —he can’t help but think it, can’t help but _know._

This is the closest he can get to Stiles without actually fucking him. Fucking Stiles is something he wouldn’t know how to come back from. Stiles doesn’t deserve that, doesn’t deserve the slow spread of poison that Derek brings with him everywhere and dusts across everything he touches.

He wouldn’t know how to fuck Stiles without falling in love with him, and Derek’s love is the killing kind.

Derek doesn’t speak to Stiles again after that, but it’s better this way. This way, he doesn’t say, “I only ever kiss her to see if I can taste you under her tongue,” doesn’t say, “I only leave marks over yours so that there’s somewhere we’ve both been.” He doesn’t say, “When I come in her mouth, it’s almost like we touched.”

Derek doesn’t say a lot of things.

In the dark of his bedroom, one hand around his cock and the other dragging rough through the sheets by his hip, he says, “Stiles.”

…

Stiles is wrong. Derek never thought he was too cool for Homecoming.

He’s _terrified_ of it.

It’s not an irrational fear, or something mundane like the fear of looking like an idiot while trying to dance, or the fear of accidentally spilling something down his date’s expensive dress and getting abandoned during the first half hour for someone more suave.

He spent his first Homecoming in the hospital holding a dying girl’s hand, and his second pressing down for the first time into a woman who let him think he was fucking her and not the other way around.

Obviously, he didn’t bother with his third or fourth.

…

Paige was a sophomore, and she was beautiful. She and Derek were supposed to go to Homecoming together his freshman year, and they were supposed to go to Prom in the Spring, and after Prom they were supposed to climb into the back of the car she got with her provisional license for her fifteen and a half-th birthday and lose their virginity together.

It was five nights before Homecoming; the voting for Homecoming Court wasn’t even closed yet. Derek had voted for Laura and Paige and Patrick, and also himself, because you’re allowed. He and Paige had already gone to the shops in the city half an hour away, to pick out her dress and a matching tie to go with Patrick’s old tux they’d gotten refitted for Derek—the one Patrick wore once to sophomore Prom and grew out of before Homecoming the next year.

Paige didn’t have her provisional license yet because her half birthday was three months away. He doesn’t even remember what they were going out to do: see a movie at the crappy theater in town or go bowling or eat pizza from Antonio’s where they make it in real brick ovens. She picked up Derek in her father’s car because he was out of town, and it was brilliantly illicit, the first really bad thing she’d ever done.

Derek should have said no; he should have made her step out of the car, should have stood outside and shook his head and refused to get in. Should have asked Mom to take them, should have done anything except slide into that car beside her and let her drive to her own death.

When they found the sedan wrapped around a tree at the edge of his family’s property, Paige wasn’t breathing, a punctured lung and cranial hemorrhaging. Derek got a long, shallow scratch just under the hairline at his left temple and never found relief in unconsciousness because he stayed awake the whole time.

The tie he bought for Homecoming—the one Paige helped him pick, holding it up next to the tulle of her dress to make sure the colors matched—is still rolled into a tight ball and wedged between two loose floorboards in the back corner of his closet.

…

Several months later, Derek was on his way upstairs to his bedroom when he ran into Laura and her boyfriend kissing out on the landing, her shirt off and his hand on her boob. It was shocking, to Derek, that your girlfriend can be dead, it can be your fault, you can be slowly and silently drowning in guilt, and still be embarrassed to walk in on your sister making out with her boyfriend. That’s not how it should be; it didn’t seem fair, that little things like that still _mattered_ to him.

Looking back, it’s no wonder the knife sunk so easily into his chest when Kate came along and plunged it in.

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which, eventually, something has to bend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who reviewed, you guys are literally the best! The Japanese novel mentioned herein is completely fictional, but I left it vague enough that it could definitely apply to a real book if you wanted to insert your favorite Japanese novel here.

In diversity lit, they’re comparing the English translation of a Japanese novel with _Frankenstein_ by Mary Shelley _,_ because _Frankenstein_ is on the mandatory reading list for all sophomores and the class is composed solely of juniors and seniors. It’s supposed to be a common basis of knowledge, but Derek knows some of the other kids have to scramble to read both books at once, probably staying up late each night kicking themselves. Most of Derek’s classmates in sophomore year sat hunched over their phones while they looked up the summary and the slapdash analysis on Spark Notes at the beginning of class, five minutes before the comprehension quiz.

Derek read the whole book cover to cover. It was nearly the end of the year, just a month of so left before school let out for the summer, and his family had only just received the all-clear to move back into their house. The fresh paint slapped over the repairs—new drywall and floor panels replacing everything damaged by the smoke—was still wet. He couldn’t escape the sharp, chemical scent of it. It bled like toxic gas into every corner of the house.

It only stood as a reminder. Some things lost in the fire could never be repaired, not with all the paneling and all the white paint in the world.

It’s lunchtime, and Boyd has the translated Japanese book propped open behind his lunch tray. “This book is nothing like _Frankenstein_ ,” he says, brow furrowing doubtfully.

Derek raises his eyebrows. He watches as Boyd picks up his grease-logged grilled cheese, the way the whole things flops pitifully, and is glad he’s made a habit of skipping out on cafeteria food in favor of grabbing McDonald’s during his free period, even if Boyd always wheedles a free chocolate shake out of it. Boyd is a trooper who will eat anything, including floppy grilled cheese sandwiches, so Derek figures a chocolate shake  is his due. “It has a lot in common with _Frankenstein,_ ” he argues, gesturing idly at the cover.

“How,” Boyd asks flatly, raising a skeptical eyebrow of his own.

“It’s all about fate verses free will, isn’t it? Whether or not anyone can fight against what they’ve been made into. And they can’t. Fate wins out both times.”

Boyd slaps the book down flat on the table and glares at Derek over his lunch tray. “Thanks. Now you’ve spoiled it.”

Derek shrugs. “It wasn’t as good as _Frankenstein_ , anyway.”

Boyd sighs and flips the paperback closed, leaning down to tuck it into the front pocket of his backpack where it sits on the floor by his feet. “I like it better. Well,” he amends, “I liked it better until I realized it’s going to be just as fucking depressing.”

“It’s not _as_ depressing as _Frankenstein_.”

“Ah,” Boyd says, and anyone else might miss the slight uptick at the corner of his mouth, the teasing light in his dark eyes, but Derek’s been friends with Boyd long enough that he knows where to look. “Now I know why you liked _Frankenstein_ better.”

Derek frowns at him and kicks the leg of Boyd’s chair. “No, asshole. I liked _Frankenstein_ better because it’s a _classic_ and it’s well written and it’s a monster book.”

Boyd snorts and dips the corner of his grilled cheese in the watery tomato soup they hand out in little Styrofoam cups. “Yeah. Keep telling yourself that.”

Derek sets his jaw stubbornly. “It’s true.”

“‘Because monsters’ is not a compelling reason, coming from you,” Boyd says, raising his eyebrows in challenge, because he knows that’s something Derek can’t resist. “You’re not one of those crazy-eyed, supernatural-obsessed tweens who build shrines to Twilight and drag every guy they meet out into the light to see if he sparkles.”

Derek’s frown deepens. “Don’t. You know how I feel about _Twilight_.”

Boyd glances down at his lunch tray guiltily, twirling a plastic spoon around and around through his thin soup. “I know.”

“ _Frankenstein_ uses monsters to explore the human condition through something we can distance ourselves from,” Derek says, and even though he’s scowling he knows Boyd recognizes the peace offering by the way his eyes snap back up, hand dropping away from his food.

“Yeah, but the distance creates a situation in which there’s zero accountability. The reader sees the creature as a monster, too, and he’s not close enough to human for the parallel to even come across properly,” Boyd argues, and Derek sits back in his plastic cafeteria chair, settling in for a long debate.

Boyd, who is more reticent even than Derek, and a lot calmer and steadier, can talk passionately about a book he likes for hours. He and Derek have spent entire lunch periods discussing something they had to read in diversity—or something they read in freshman or sophomore year, or even just for fun—then part ways for Boyd’s chem class and Derek’s free period only to start right where they left off again before the bell rings in diversity lit.

If Stiles knew Derek had long, in-depth conversations about symbolism and creative license in his spare time, he’d probably laugh himself sick. It’s not something anyone would really expect from a guy like Derek.

Derek had dressed up as Frankenstein’s monster for Halloween when he was six, the last costume he wore before he fell into a four-year obsession with werewolves and refused to wear anything else. He hadn’t been able to appreciate the irony until nearly ten years later, when he sat awake in his bedroom six hours longer than he told Mom he would and read _Frankenstein_ for the first time. He’d finished it, set the book on his nightstand, turned off his reading light, and laughed and laughed and laughed until he cried, and after that he couldn’t seem to stop until sleep pulled him under.

…

Cora started playing the oboe as a joke. It was an idle act of rebellion against Papa’s insistence that all of them pick an instrument and spend their first year of middle school learning how to play it, deciding at the end of they year whether or not to continue.

Papa loved music, and so does Derek. At the age of eight, he’d spent seven months begging Papa to buy him an electric blue violin and teach him to play like the man on the strings in ELO. He remembers countless hours spent lying on his back, side by side with Papa on his parents’ blue wall-to-wall carpet while _Out of the Blue_ spun under the needle of Papa’s record player. And whenever it skipped over to “Mr. Blue Sky,” he and Papa would raise their voices in unison to sing along, Papa’s deep baritone against Derek’s clear, high voice, slightly off-tune with a child’s ponderous imprecision.

Derek’s blue violin has been gathering dust at the back of his closet alongside the thirty-dollar tie he never wore, untouched for nearly two years. _Out of the Blue_ sits on the turntable of the record player that’s tucked now in the corner of Derek’s room, and when it skips over to “Mr. Blue Sky,” the lyrics come out scratchy like a hoarse voice worn from overuse.

Cora never really got into music, preferring instead to run around barefoot in the grass and search for wooly caterpillars in the woodpile. But the rule was she had to pick an instrument, and she chose the oboe, and for the first five months she hated it. And then she got good.

And that’s how Derek ended up here, sitting in the auditorium of the school, in the first row of uncomfortable white plastic folding chairs like those ones they use at outdoor weddings, as though they’re somehow fancier just because they’re shaped differently than the standard metal ones.

Cora is one of two oboe players in the school band, so the melodic whine of her instrument is clearly audible to anyone who listens closely. This is their first live performance, and the only one before the Fall Musical in November, where Cora will be in the pit with the rest of the band to set the score. Mom isn’t sitting with Derek and Patrick, instead opting for a seat at the end by the aisle where nobody’s head can block the camera.

The finale is a loud, frenetic number, the music swelling into organized chaos at the crescendo. Though Cora can’t smile around the mouthpiece of her oboe, there’s a light in her eyes, and Derek knows this is her favorite part of the piece, can see it on her face—knows her well enough to tell just from listening to the frantic energy of it. She looks so alive, the music moving like a living thing around them. Whenever he watches Cora lose herself to the melody, Derek remembers why he loves music in the first place.

Afterwards, she comes out into the lobby to meet them, and Derek and Patrick and Mom all hug her and tell her how well she played. She wheedles Mom into showing her the footage and complains about the way she looks with her mouth pinched around the reed.

Derek slings an arm across her shoulders as they head out to the car, climbing into the backseat of Mom’s old station wagon, the secondhand one she and Papa bought together when Derek was eleven. He lets Cora rest her head against his shoulder, the oboe case in her lap banging against their knees with every bump in the road.

“You’re the best damn oboe player at Beacon Hills High,” he says, face perfectly straight, and she rolls her eyes and sits up to shove lightly at his shoulder.

“There’s only two of us,” she says, feigning irritation, and Derek wrinkles his nose at her in response. Mom smiles fondly in the rearview mirror, and Derek doesn’t miss it when Cora whispers, “Thanks,” as she lets her head fall once again to his shoulder.

…

Derek and Erica are making out under the bleachers again, for the first time since that Tuesday after Homecoming, which seems so long ago now. They haven’t gotten very far, although they’re moving pretty quickly in the right direction. Derek spins them so Erica’s pressed between his body and the bleachers, hands braced against the cold metal paneling, ass grinding into Derek’s erection where it’s pressing insistently against the fly of his dark wash jeans.

A gasp sounds behind them, and Derek whips around, hands still clenched around Erica’s hips. He drags her along in his about-face, and she’s forced to lean backwards into him or risk losing balance and falling on her face. Derek has to tighten his fingers to prevent just that when she realizes who’s standing there and takes a stumbling, aborted step forward.

Stiles is standing at the very end of the lacrosse stands, frozen right at the contour of the sharp-edged shadow where it falls dark behind the bleachers. His face is cast half in darkness and half in sunlight, but there’s light enough to catch the breathless, gutted expression on his face—the sudden, miserable hunch of his shoulders.

“Wow. Are you _kidding_ me?” he asks, voice rising. And just like that, he’s livid, squaring the wounded set of his shoulders under a sudden rush of fury that lights his eyes and curls his hands into fists at his sides. “You know what, _fuck_ this. And fuck both of you.” He cuts a hand sharply through the air like it’s really that easy to sever ties with one flick of the wrist, before turning jerkily around and taking a long, loping step away.

“Stiles,” Erica calls at his back, throwing out a hand, as though that will do anything—heedless of the length of space and weight of lies standing as a barrier between them. A barrier that one pleading word and an outstretched hand can never hope to fell, perhaps even if it was the word and hand of God Himself.

Stiles’ head spins back around to stare at them, but Erica falters. She can’t think of what to say, Derek sees it in her eyes: that dull, creeping haze of defeat. Stiles’ mouth twists and he turns away.

“Stiles,” Derek says, repeating Erica’s earlier shout—only his voice is quiet, commanding, and the clear surprise as Stiles’ eyes snap wide open is mirrored by Derek’s own breathless confusion, his dread.

Stiles has spun completely around to face him.

“Come here,” Derek says, and Stiles takes one slow step forward as though helpless to resist, eyes still wide beneath a furrowed brow, his mouth hanging gently open, soft lips parted. Erica’s back tenses slightly where it’s still pressed tight to Derek’s chest.

Apparently, none of them know what the fuck Derek’s doing.

Stiles moves slowly, cautious, and stops about a dozen feet away. Derek jerks his chin sharply, and when Stiles only stands and stares, Derek lets his hand fall away from Erica’s waist. He gestures impatiently for Stiles to step closer.

When he’s right beside them, so close Derek can see the pulse jumping at the curve of his throat, Derek raises an eyebrow at Erica. She stares at him, a crease of confusion dimpling her forehead, but Derek casts a quick glance from her face to Stiles’ and back again, and her eyes widen.

She takes Stiles’ hand and lays it over her boob.

Derek closes his eyes. “If you stop wanting to,” he says, heart drumming a frantic staccato beat over his ribs, “say something.”

“Okay,” Erica says immediately, but when Derek opens his eyes they’re locked on Stiles’.

Stiles nods jerkily, and Derek lets out his breath.

Fingers unsteady, Derek reaches out and sets his hand in the curve at the small of Stiles’ back—tugs him in until Stiles’ hips press flush against Erica’s, Derek’s body still lined up all along her back, his pelvis slotted snug against her ass. He moves both hands to Stiles’ hips, and his thumbs dig into the soft divots sloping down from the sharp points of his hipbones, fingers sliding around to circle his waist and grip tight. He bites his lower lip on a groan, moving his thumbs in slow circles over Stiles’ sides, feeling the muscles tremble under his hands.

Stiles lets out a ragged breath and Derek slowly circles his hips, hands guiding Stiles’ hips into the same motion in the opposite direction, pulling him in closer. Erica moans as her body is pressed tighter between them, friction from both sides pulling at the hem of her dress and twisting the fabric across her body.

Stiles’ fingertips press into Erica’s breast as his fingers spasm, his other hand sweeping her hair back over her shoulder and onto Derek’s, the pad of Stiles’ thumb brushing inadvertently against the space between Derek’s nose and his upper lip. This time he can’t stop the moan from building in the back of his throat, and he pulls Stiles closer, thrusting harder against Erica to give himself an excuse.

Derek slides one hand from Stiles’ hip to the soft stretch of light muscle just beneath Erica’s navel, slowly sliding his fingers downward until his palm cups her through the dark fabric of her dress. It’s Erica’s turn to moan, grinding forward into his hand and pushing Derek’s knuckles firmly against Stiles’ erection. Stiles lets out a choked, broken noise in his chest, and Derek’s dick jumps against Erica’s ass as he presses his thumb firmly over her clit, angling his hand just so to press his wrist to Stiles’ unopen fly.

“F—fuck,” Stiles groans, tongue darting out to wet his lips, and Derek wants so badly to lean forward over Erica’s shoulder and bite into Stiles’ mouth, lick along the seam of his lips and open him up against Derek's tongue. He kisses Erica to distract himself.

Derek flicks his thumb over Erica’s clit, the motion bumping his wrist harder against Stiles, and Stiles bucks forward with a little gasp, shoving just the tip of Derek’s thumb into Erica’s slit through her dress and her black tights and her underwear. And then she’s coming, fluttering around what little of Derek’s thumb has made it inside her. She thrusts forward, bucking into his hand, Derek’s knuckles knocking back into Stiles’ dick. Stiles surges forward, trapping Derek’s hand between their bodies and grinding into the back of it, forcing an explosive breath out his nose and coming against the back of Derek’s wrist.

Derek grinds forward into Erica one last time, pulling Stiles closer with the freely roaming hand that’s migrated to the curve of Stiles’ ass, and follows.

In all his time fucking Erica, Derek hasn’t come in his pants once. He looks up at Stiles, his dark flushed cheeks, the long lashes fringing his closed eyelids, and feels his heart drop down into his stomach. He lets his head bang up against the bleachers at his back, and the sound rings out all around them.

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The part where the shit hits the fan (and we have to wait to see how it splatters).

The next time, Derek makes sure they all at least get out of their fucking pants. Because _really_.

…

Laura Skype-calls Derek every week like clockwork. He can’t help the vague, creeping feeling of guilt when he thinks too hard about it, knowing she’s checking up on him, studying his face and his words for something off, some sign that stands out in warning.

Derek and Laura have always been close. She’s the one who taught him to ride a bike, out on the hill behind their house. On his fifth try, he built up too much speed before realizing he had no idea how to brake, and she tackled him to the ground ten feet away from a boulder he would have hit head-on. She used to let him curl up in her bed when he had nightmares. Together, they built a pillow fort on the floor of his bedroom, and she’d sneak in after bedtime to pull him along beneath the canopied spare blanket, hiding away and reading Harry Potter out loud to him, under the weak beam of his flashlight.

When Kate Argent sauntered into his biology class and lured him in with her pretty face and false promises, Laura’s the only one who knew something was wrong from the start.

He boots up his laptop at seven forty five and fucks around on the internet for fifteen minutes before the call comes through and he clicks the icon to launch the webcam.

“Hey, baby bro,” says Laura, grinning up from his screen, surrounded by the gentle chaos of her dorm room at Berkeley. Her roommate always goes to dinner with her boyfriend at eight o’clock on Wednesday nights, so Laura is alone in the room, wrapped up in her Superman snuggie and reclining on a futon squeezed into the cramped space between two single beds. There’s a pair of leggings thrown over the back of her desk chair, and Derek can see them in the bottom corner of his screen.

“Hi,” Derek says, shifting his computer closer across the rug in the center of his room, where he’s lying stretched out on his stomach.

“How you doing, Bear?” she asks, and the childhood nickname is soothing and comfortable in her familiar voice, like his old slippers, footprints worn into the soles from the weight of countless steps.

Derek shrugs halfheartedly, the movement a little awkward with some of his weight supported on his shoulders.

Laura laughs and flicks the middle of her screen, probably the spot where his nose is. “Good talk,” she teases, and Derek wrinkles his nose. She leans closer to her webcam until Derek only sees pieces of her face flickering across the screen one by one as they pass in front of the lens—her nose, her chin, her left eyebrow, and finally, a single giant eye. “Let me see,” she says musingly, “Do you have a mouth?” Derek tries valiantly, but he can’t stop the slow smile from spreading across his face, and Laura laughs out in triumph. “There it is! It finally moved, I was starting to think it was fake.”

“I could just close my laptop and go make myself a sandwich,” Derek says, and holds in a laugh at Laura’s exaggerated pout.

“You’d never. I’m way to cool. You wish I still lived with you 24/7.”

“Yeah,” Derek murmurs, glancing away from her and toward a haphazard stack of books teetering on the very edge of falling, held back only by the leg of his desk they’re leaning against. _Frankenstein_ is second from the bottom, and he can see the black lettering on the spine.

“I know,” Laura says just as quietly, giving him the soulful look he knows means she’s wishing she could reach him through the screen, pull him in by the shoulders, rub a hand over his hair. Then she brightens, breaking out a big grin. “Good news, though. I’m coming down next weekend to visit!”

“What? Why? Are you going to miss Halloween?”

Laura scoffs. “Nothing short of death and dismemberment could keep me away from Hale’s Haunted House of Horrors, little brother, don’t you worry your cute fluffy head. I can come up for both, can’t I?”

This time, when Derek feels the insistent tug of a smile pulling at his lips, he doesn’t even bother trying to fight it.

Laura smiles back and changes the subject. “So, you’ll never guess what Hot Guy said today in Potions,” she says, and Derek laughs a little at her nickname for chemistry class. He recognizes it from his freshman year, when Laura had to suffer through chem with Harris and referred to him as “Professor Snape” whenever she wasn’t in his class, and once when she was. He’d given her detention and made her write lines, and she’d told Derek later that he was obviously not Snape himself—he was clearly the bastard love child of Snape and Umbridge. Derek thinks that was the first time he’d really laughed, long and hard and breathless, since Paige died.

…

Derek and Erica have sex again, just the two of them. They’re under the bleachers, in the exact spot they’d been both times Stiles was with them. That knowledge sings deep in Derek’s bones and straight through to his cock, picking up some of the excitement that’s lost with only Stiles’ fading marks under his tongue, now that he knows what it’s like to really _feel_ Stiles—his lean, warm body under Derek’s hands, the ghost of his breath over Derek’s cheekbone.

Sitting in the grass with her back propped against the bleachers, Erica bows her head and presses careful fingers to her brow, perfect control over her body even now. “I don’t know if it’s better or worse, now that he knows,” she says tiredly, reaching toward her boot for the pack of cigarettes she keeps there. She stops short and glances guiltily up at Derek, and he knows she’s remembering the conversation they had when this thing first began. It seems so long ago now, but in reality, the month isn’t even over yet.

Derek doesn’t say, “It’s always been worse when he’s not here,” and he thinks it’s a good thing he’s a man of few words. He imagines there are very few things _Stiles_ doesn’t say.

Erica looks tired, a little sad, and as he contemplations her face—her pretty dark lips, her perfectly sculpted eyebrows—Derek realizes there was never anywhere else this could have led. This whole mess started with Erica looking for something better, a more classically attractive person than she ever thought she could have, while Derek was settling, knowing he could never take what he wanted. Erica was taking a step up, Derek was taking a step down, and each step took them further and further away from one another. By now, the chasm between them is so great they can barely see each other across the distance, even as they sit side by side.

This arrangement was never designed to last.

…

After school, Derek swings the Camaro around front to wait for Cora, but she never shows up. He’s rubbing the back of his neck to ward off the first prickles of worry when one of Cora’s friends approaches nervously and raises a hand to knock on the window. Derek lunges to roll it down before her knuckle can touch the glass and hopes the split-second of panic didn’t show on his face.

“Cora got a ride home from Lois,” she says haltingly after the pane disappears into the door, twirling a lock of hair around one finger.

When Derek frowns, her eyes widen and she bolts before he can thank her. Mom would kill him if she knew.

When he gets home, Cora has locked herself up in her room. He approaches the door warily, rapping one tentative knuckle against the wood. “Cora?” he calls softly.

“Go _away,_ ” Cora yells, and Derek frowns at the closed door.

“Cora. If you’re getting a ride from someone else, you need to let me know,” he says as gently as he knows how, these days, just loud enough to reach her through the thick oak.

“I said _go AWAY_ , Derek!” There’s a muffled thump by his ear where it’s pressed to the wood, and the corner of Cora’s green-patterned pillowcase peeks suddenly out from the gap between the floorboards and her door. He can imagine the scowl on her face as she watches the pillow she just threw at him slump to the floor—the way she probably didn’t consider, when she first lobbed it across the room, that she won’t have a pillow anymore unless she’s willing to drag herself out of bed to get it.

“I was worried about you,” Derek mutters, and it’s not as difficult to admit as he’d thought it would be.

Cora doesn’t respond, and he stands there silently for several more minutes before sighing and heading back down the stairs.

Derek sets himself up at his desk and works on his AP Gov homework until Mom calls them both down to dinner. He hears Cora’s door creak open across the hall, but by the time he steps out into the hallway she’s already gone.

He sits at the table in his usual spot directly across the Cora’s, but she won’t look at him, scowling instead down at the potatoes on her plate and stabbing them, silent angry jabs with her fork as though imagining someone’s face in the gravy.

Mom looks between them, a confused line settling between her eyebrows, before turning to stare at Cora inquiringly. When Cora continues to attack the food on her plate without glancing up, Mom looks over at Derek instead and asks, “So, what did you do in school today, Derek?”

A clatter sounds from across the table, and Derek’s gaze jerks over to Cora. She’s slammed her fork down on the tabletop, her plate jostled out of place and her hand pressed down flat against the tablecloth. She fixes Derek with a glare so black with fury he physically recoils from it. “What did Derek do today? I’ll tell you, Mom," she says, hand fisting over the tablecloth, and Derek feels his stomach plummet. He knows what she's going to say before she says it. "Today, Derek had sex with someone else’s girlfriend.”

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we observe the Hale Family Dynamics and Derek goes to (gasp!) a house party.

As Cora’s revelation rings out through the kitchen, Mom sucks in a sharp breath and turns wide, incredulous eyes on Derek. In the silence that follows, the words rattle around and around in Derek’s head like a pebble in a tin can. Today, Derek had sex with someone else’s girlfriend. Today and the Tuesday after Homecoming and two days after that and enough times in between that Derek stopped counting.

And laid out like that, in his little sister’s voice, with his mother sitting three feet away, it sounds so much worse. In Erica’s breathless, sex-rough murmur and Stiles’ angry, bright-eyed accusation, it seemed like something illicit, something exciting. But here under the fluorescents in the kitchen of his childhood home, it feels sordid and cheap, an ugly thing hanging rancid over his head and tainting this sanctuary.

Derek burns to deny it, to scrub away the rot and turn it into something he can bear. “It’s not like that,” he says, and his words come out like begging.

“Oh, so you _weren’t_ making out with Erica under the bleachers after lunch?” Cora asks, raising two angry eyebrows.

“No, I…” Derek scrambles for an answer, some way out, but all he can manage is a weak protest. “I was, but—”

He’s cut off abruptly by Cora’s loud, humorless burst of laughter. Her mouth twists bitterly and she shakes her head, says, “Right. You were just trying to clean her mouth out. With your tongue.” Derek glares and opens his mouth, but before he can speak, Cora continues, voice hard. “Screw you, Derek. He’s a good guy. He doesn’t deserve that.”

Derek feels a burst of real anger flare up for the first time. He slams his hand down on the tabletop, unconsciously mirroring his sister when his fingers clench into a fist beside his plate. “You don’t know what the _fuck_ you’re talking about,” he says, voice flat and dangerous.

“Derek!” Mom says sharply. His shoulders hunch up a little in shame.

Derek keeps his glare fixed on Cora even as he mumbles an apology directed at Mom, but she doesn’t give an inch. When her eyes light up with that furious conviction, she could face an entire battalion without flinching. “I don’t know what’s _not to get_ in this situation. Doesn’t seem that complicated.”

“Did you even talk to him?” Derek asks, and he knows his voice is too loud, his eyes a little wild, but he can’t bring himself to care, not when everything he’s done looks so much more painful under the stark white light in this kitchen. The legs of his chair scream out against the tile as he stands, his knees slamming hard against it and sending it skidding three feet backwards. “Try getting all the facts straight before you start throwing accusations around,” he snarls, and whirls away from the table to stomp off up the stairs.

Derek doesn’t know _why_ he’s so angry. He knows he doesn’t have the right. What Cora said is true in all the ways that matter—would have been completely and incontrovertibly true just days ago, but somehow it feels wrong, now. The situation has warped into something else, something _more_ than that, and he’s clinging to the fact that it _means_ something. Because it _has_ to mean something, needs to be something bearable so he can sleep at night—so he can look into the mirror every day and see something that isn’t the ghost of Kate staring back at him, phantom blood staining her hands.

Derek spins around to punch his doorframe, but it doesn’t make him feel any better. All he gets is a busted knuckle.

…

Derek is contemplating tearing the entire chapter on externalities out of his Econ book when someone taps softly on his bedroom door. He considers ignoring it for approximately one tenth of a second, but he knows it’s Mom—at this point, he’s pretty sure Cora wouldn’t bother with a knock, instead going straight for kicking the door off its hinges—and if he ignores his mother she might kill him. “Come in,” he says, and tries to keep the grudging note out of his voice.

From the wry look on Mom’s face when she swings the door open, he doesn’t think he succeeded. “Hello, Derek,” she says, leaning her shoulder on the door jam, hand still resting on the knob. She smiles ruefully at him. “This is your chance to share your side of the story,” she offers, and her expression isn’t expectant or admonishing, but he knows she’ll listen to anything he has to say, that she’ll be sympathetic and understanding and still take away computer and car privileges when he’s finished.

He doesn’t say anything.

Mom sighs and pushes herself up off the doorframe. “I’m going to need your car keys,” she says, businesslike. “I’ll give them to you every morning so you can drive your sister to school, and take them back when you get home. I also want your computer. You can use it for homework at the kitchen table where I can see you. I know I can’t stop you from… seeing that girl, but if I find out that you have, those keys are mine for the rest of the semester. And I don’t want to hear you complaining about how I’m trying to control your life choices, because even if I can’t decide who you’re intimate with and how, having sex at school is still not allowed, and you knew that when you did it. Now, you have to face the consequences. I know you’re eighteen, but you still live in this house, under my rules.”

“Yes, Mom,” Derek says, staring down at the nearly indecipherable six-paragraph introduction to externalities and feeling morbidly glad he didn’t rip out the chapter, if only because it’s giving him an excuse not to meet Mom’s eyes and see the dull shimmer of tired disappointment there.

“And you’d better be using protection, or I’ll kill you myself,” she adds sternly.

Derek’s head whips up and he stares at her, unable to control the widening of his eyes, the way his mouth twists in embarrassed consternation.

“I’m serious, mister.”

“I have been,” Derek says gravely, bobbing his head in an awkward nod and trying to look as earnest as he can from beneath his heavy eyebrows.

“Okay,” she says, nodding, and Derek glances back down. “I love you.”

“Love you too,” Derek whispers to his textbook, and he doesn’t realize Mom’s come into the room until her shadow falls into his light. Her breath ruffles his hair when she leans down to drop a kiss on the top of his head. She trails a neatly manicured hand through his hair on her way out, nails scritching gently against his scalp, and closes the door behind her.

…

On Friday, Derek overhears Stiles and McCall talking at lunch about Lydia Martin’s house party, and when Stiles says “It’s going to be fun, it’ll be great,” he loops his arm over Erica’s shoulders where she’s sitting beside him. Ever since the day she thinks Stiles found out about them, Erica has been more subdued, more receptive to Stiles’ casually intimate touches. The flicker of guilt in her eyes every time Stiles smiles over at her is so obvious to Derek he’s surprised the whole school doesn’t know what’s going on between the three of them.

Derek’s been good since he got his keys and computer privileges taken away, but looking at the way Stiles’ hand folds over Erica’s shoulder, his long fingers, the strong, square angles of his palm… well, Derek never claimed to have much in the way of self-restraint. He’s already broken his rule about never hooking up with any of the kids from BHHS: what’s one more broken rule? What’s one more mistake willingly made; one more sharpened line on his face; one more nail in the coffin of the shy boy he once was, the good son Mom deserved, the boy without any blood on his hands, who didn’t know the sound of a dying girl taking her last breath or the smell of human ash.

He’s not that boy anymore. So he tells Mom he’s going to bed early, goes upstairs, shuts the door to his bedroom, and crawls out the window and down the latticework, landing crouched in a dark, thorny bush that hugs the siding at the base of the house.

Boyd’s car is idling halfway down the long dirt drive leading out to Derek’s house in the middle of the preserve, and when he climbs in he gives Boyd a grateful nod before they peel out onto the main road. Boyd flicks the headlights back on when the house is out of sight.

Derek’s never been to a high school party. Before Kate, the most he’d ever had to drink was a sip of Papa’s champagne at Uncle Peter’s wedding, and a mouthful of whiskey from the bottle Laura snuck out of their parents’ liquor cabinet when they went out to eat on their anniversary. It was scotch, and it burned the whole way down and left him coughing for a minute straight, Laura pounding an open palm between his shoulder blades while his eyes streamed.

After Kate, Derek got his fake ID, and by the end of junior year no bouncer at any of the four nightclubs in Beacon County bothered to card him anymore, stepping aside to let him pass after taking one look at his hard jawline and heavy brow. And if he ever does get a request for ID, the glance at his license is quick, perfunctory, and not nearly discerning enough to catch the little inconsistencies he knows are jumbled up in the numbers.

There’s no way Derek would choose jungle juice and cheap beer over a bourbon, neat, or a scotch on the rocks. There’s no way he’d trade thumping baselines out of quality speakers for crackling Top 40s pop monstrosities from someone’s brother’s crappy seven-year-old guitar amp—or the hot press of beautiful, unfamiliar bodies dancing surrounded by pretty faces forgotten in the light of morning, for awkward shouted conversations and the grabbing hands of people he knows but doesn’t like.

Except this time, Stiles is going to be there.

Derek’s just glad Boyd already got his joke about popping Derek’s house-party cherry out of the way over the phone when Derek called him up asking for a ride. They drive to Lydia’s house in comfortable near-silence.

When he gets there, Derek doesn’t bother to line up like a lemming in front of the Gatorade cooler that definitely doesn’t contain Gatorade, and goes straight for the kitchen in hopes he’ll find something a little more palatable than a cooler dumped full of Kool-Aid powder and five-dollar bottles of Drain-o posing as vodka.

He abandons his search when he sees Lydia winding her way through the crowd in his general direction. He can’t remember whether she and Jackson are on again or off again at the moment—even if they’re on again, she’ll probably still try to rope him into conversation, since seeing him at a party is such a novelty and the party he’s decided to show up at is _hers_ —so he ducks out of the kitchen and into the room where the music is the loudest.

From across the room, he sees Stiles and Erica dancing by the far wall, face to face, pelvises grinding together in a way that triggers a sense-memory so strong Derek is half hard in an instant. His mouth goes bone dry and he has to lick his lips to stop the tingling. Neither of them are facing him until Stiles gets bumped by someone passing by, and then his eyes catch on Derek’s and he freezes. Derek stares at him for a moment, mouth slightly parted, eyes dark, and gives a slow jerk of his head. _Come here_.

Stiles lets go of Erica’s hips, grabs her hand, and tugs her along behind him as he heads Derek’s way. He smiles a little, at Derek, and Derek feels his heart twitch just like his dick did when he first caught sight of Stiles. Derek knows he’s about to do another thing he’ll regret, knows it’s yet another step in his descent. He’s known from the start—since that day under the bleachers with Erica, when he broke his rule about not banging high school students: the beginning of the end—where all this would lead, but suddenly he can’t bring himself to care.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Derek thinks this is going to kill him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can’t believe this monster was supposed to be an angsty little 10,000-word, five-chapter jaunt. It’s totally mutated.

Derek stops Stiles with a hand on his shoulder when he tries to push past out into the hall. Pressing in close to his face, Derek takes a long breath through his nose.

“Whoa, dude, what’s with the sniffing?” Stiles asks, shying back a little, bumping lightly into Erica. He fixes Derek with a bemused look, eyebrows raised.

“You don’t smell like alcohol,” Derek says, suspicious.

Stiles barks out a laugh. “Yeah, uh, that would be ‘cause I didn’t drink any.” At Derek’s disbelieving frown, Stiles sighs. “I’m serious, dude, I’m not good at knowing my limits, like, _at all_. Last time I drank too much at one of these things—didn’t you hear about this? I’m pretty sure everyone heard about this, do I really have to—okay, well, judging by the slight confused tinge to your Murder Eyebrows I’d say no one told you, which, isn’t Cora your sister? Me and Cora, we’re the kind of friends who say hi in the halls, you know how it is, or I guess maybe you don’t? Anyway, she was the one who pulled me out of the cooler.”

Derek’s heart stutters for a moment. He hadn’t even considered that Cora might be here tonight.

Stiles is still speaking beside him, oblivious to Derek’s momentary, panicked distraction. “Scott was off stalking Allison from a distance, because he doesn’t realize that’s totally creepy, poor guy, so he couldn’t stop me from getting myself attempted-murdered. _So_ I guess I decided it’d be a good idea to pick a fight with Jackson, and it ended with my head in the cooler and Lydia kicking me in the shin, so, yeah. I haven’t drank anything at all tonight, I swear.”

Derek stares for a moment, slightly stunned, while he tries to parse this barrage of words.

When he turns his assessing gaze on Erica, she sighs, sounding put-upon, and says, “Stiles didn’t want to be the only one not drinking.”

After a few more seconds of suspicious staring and a series of increasingly exasperated looks from Stiles, Derek nods and leads them out into the hallway. They crowd into a tiny hall closet, all three of them, Stiles braced against the wall on one side and Derek on the other.

When Lydia checks around the house in the morning to see what needs cleaning up, she’s going to open the door to this closet, and she’s going to be _pissed_. Derek wishes he could be there to see it.

…

Derek is going to _die_. He’s going to die and someone will call the police and the party will get busted and Mom will find out he disobeyed her only when they bring him to her door in a body bag.

Derek is going to die because Stiles is _naked_ and Derek is _touching him_.

He’s seen Stiles’ skin before—of course he has. He’s seen his hands and his face, his long, surprisingly hairy arms, even his dick in the dark under the bleachers, but never like _this_.

Here, he can put his hands wherever he wants, can map out Stiles’ freckles with lazy, trailing fingers, can dig his thumbs into the warm, firm softness of his stomach and run his hands down the long, smooth planes of his back. He can touch Stiles _wherever he wants,_ can touch him _skin to skin_ , but he is going to die because there are whole untouched swathes of Stiles blocked from Derek’s hands by the body in between them.

Derek has never lost himself like this during sex. With Kate, everything was too new, his nerves so frayed with the fear of fucking up that he never really let himself relax, never let himself give into it. Since then, he’s never let himself trust anyone long enough to let down his guard, even while pounding into them. Even when letting them shove him down and take him, there’s always a piece of himself he keeps hidden, something he refuses to give over.

Now, he feels overtaken, feels like his own skin can’t contain him. His heart pounds like it wants out, like it wants to give itself up. Somewhere in the back of his head, he knows this is the precipice he’s been trying to keep himself back from, the truth he’s been trying to hide from himself, but that voice is drowned out in the searing flood of _want_.

Derek is thrusting hard forward, and if he closes his eyes, he can almost pretend it’s Stiles pressing close all along his chest, hips, thighs—the heat of Stiles’ body surrounding him, pulling him in. But when his eyes are closed, he can’t watch Stiles’ face; the way his eyelids flutter; the way he breathes through his half-open mouth, wide lips wet from his tongue as it flickers out. His breath is probably _so_ warm against the side of Erica’s neck, and Derek is going to _die_ because it’s not his neck Stiles is breathing into.

Derek’s cock is pounding into Erica from the front while Stiles slides between her ass cheeks, his cock bare, and Derek holds her tight around him with one hand, fingers digging into her skin.

Stiles’ balls brush Derek’s hand every time he rocks forward, and the tip of his dick occasionally bumps up against Derek’s balls like a wet, pecking kiss that sets a fire in his bones, hollows him out until even the air leaves his chest in a rush, scalding his throat on the way out. Derek can’t breathe through the _want_ that’s burning through him. Derek is going to _die_ and he won’t even regret it, wouldn’t choose any other way to go.

When he comes, his orgasm feels like it’s been punched out of him.

Stiles shudders moments later under the weight of Derek’s hand at the base of his spine, and his come hits wet and warm against the tops of Derek’s thighs right above where his jeans are shucked down. Derek feels like he could come all over again if he wasn’t already spent, dick slipped half out of Erica.

She pushes Derek and Stiles away so she can slither back into her dress and zip up her boots. Stiles bends to gather his clothes and struggle back into them while Derek tugs his t-shirt on over his head, shrugs back into his leather jacket, and lounges back against the wall to watch them.

“I’m just gonna—” Erica trails off lamely, jabbing a thumb over her shoulder. Her eyes shift guiltily. Everything she does around Stiles seems to have this painful undercurrent of guilt, now.

She slips out of the closet while Derek’s tying off his condom, probably heading outside for a post-coital cigarette on the back porch. By the time he and Stiles follow her out, she’s nowhere to be seen. They creep further down the hallway and sneak into a darkened bedroom so Derek can wrap the used condom discreetly in toilet paper and toss it in the trash in the attached bath.

When he comes back out, Stiles is lying stretched out on the bed, shoe-clad feet hanging courteously off the end. Derek stares for a moment, half indecision and half appreciation, before falling down on the mattress by Stiles’ side.

Derek studies Stiles from the corner of his eye, head turned just barely in his direction. There’s an odd juxtaposition between Stiles and Erica, evident in the hallways at school and in the dark places they hide while they’re fucking, but equally, if not more so, in the quiet spaces between.

Erica is a study in precision—every last flutter of her eyelashes a deliberate stroke in a larger portrait, of herself as the person she chooses to show the world.

There’s nothing manufactured about Stiles’ beauty. There’s nothing coy about him, either: his want is raw, open, like a fresh wound, his blood running too close to the surface. He is only ever himself, unpolished and undiluted, and Derek wants that, wants _him,_ so badly he feels like he’s choking on it, sometimes.

He’s awkward, and masculine in an ambiguous kind of way, broad square hands and short-cropped hair and strongly corded forearms, but he has these wide, bright eyes framed by long lashes, a soft and mobile mouth set below, a flip at the end of his nose, and no deliberate control over any of it. And it shouldn’t all fit together so fluidly, shouldn’t form any kind of cohesive unit, except there’s something about him, some spark inside, that holds everything together. He’s intelligent, he’s loose-limbed and smart-mouthed and _beautiful_. He’s everything Derek wants.

He’s dangerous.

Derek likes to think, if they’d both been sophomores at the same time—two idiot fifteen-year-old kids fumbling around each other for the first time, back when Derek was fresh off Paige’s death but still cobbled together with something close to innocence—Derek could have had Stiles and not wrecked him.

Derek is eighteen, now, and anything innocent in him was burnt out years ago, along with his house, at the hands of Kate Argent.

“You look so serious,” Stiles says, breaking Derek free of his thoughts. “Turn that frown upside down.” He reaches over to prop the corners of Derek’s mouth up in a bizarre grimace, and laughs like it’s easy.

Derek’s lips burn under Stiles’ fingers, but he doesn’t knock them away. If this is all he can have, maybe he should just take it.

“No one likes a sourpuss,” Stiles says sagely, and Derek really does shove his hand away, this time, huffing. “You know, I used to think you and Cora looked nothing alike, but when you’re not being all frowny with the Murder Eyebrows and the growling, I can actually see how you guys are related.”

Derek wrinkles his nose. “I’d better frown more, then,” he says, and Stiles lets out a surprised laugh.

“Aww, don’t be mean, Cora’s pretty.” Derek glares over at him and Stiles’ throat clicks when he swallows nervously. “But _you’re_ not _pretty_ , pfft. I mean, unless you want to be pretty, then yeah: totally, totally pretty, like, prettiest guy I know.”

Derek can’t hold in his laugh, so he turns it into a snort and lets it come. “I just had sex. Let’s not talk about my little sister.”

“Look at that, you laughed, that was totally a laugh, don’t even pretend to deny it. You _do_ have a sense of humor!” Stiles cries, triumphant, throwing his hands up over his head like his team just scored a touchdown and swearing when his knuckles smack loudly against the headboard.

Derek snorts again and Stiles stops cradling his hands protectively against his chest just long enough to poke Derek crossly in the side.

“Shut up, you sadist,” he whines, moving his hand up against his mouth to suck on his swollen knuckle. Derek nearly chokes on his own tongue, disguising it with another snort like he can’t believe how ridiculous Stiles is. “And tell your eyebrows to shut up, too,” he adds, and this time Derek’s suppressed laughter is genuine.

It’s so _easy_ , being with Stiles, talking to him. Deceptively so.

“Look at us, we’re having a conversation! I mean, you haven’t actually done much talking, but you have put away the Murder Eyebrows, so I’m counting it. I don’t think we’ve ever done this before, except when we were yelling at each other, and maybe the first time we met, I kind of don’t remember it.”

Derek huffs and fixes Stiles with a wry look. “I’m not surprised you don’t remember it. You were so drunk, you couldn’t tell a conversation from a giraffe.”

“In my defense,” Stiles says, holding his hands up defensively, “Prom after party last year was _crazy_ , and your sister drank as much as I did.”

“Well, she can obviously hold her liquor better than you,” Derek says, and doesn’t realize how horrifying that statement is until he’s already said it.

“I wasn’t _that_ drunk, really, I was just, like—”

“You were convinced you were being possessed by a psychotic fox,” Derek interrupts, and Stiles turns so red Derek’s seriously worried he might catch fire.

“I didn’t _die_ , of alcohol poisoning or poor decision-making, so, whatever, _Dad_ ,” Stiles says, crossing his arms over his chest and sending Derek the stink eye.

Derek stares back, unimpressed. “Yeah, you’re right, you didn’t die, but for the grace of your gag reflex and Cora’s hands holding you down so you couldn’t do anything stupid. I’m still pissed at you for puking on my couch, by the way. Mom never managed to get the stain out.”

Stiles hides his flushed face behind his hands and moans piteously. “Oh, God, kay, time for a subject change, yep. How ‘bout them Lakers?”

Derek ignores him. “I guess now I really do understand why you didn’t drink tonight,” he muses, and Stiles glares at him, slapping him in the chest with an open palm and sending a shock straight down to Derek’s newly re-interested dick. Stiles’ flush has dangerous effects on him, especially coupled with this disarmingly playful banter, and _especially_ with all the _touching_. And in this dark room in an unfamiliar house, the faint scent of a woman’s perfume lingering in the air, everything seems softer, more okay.

And that’s the most dangerous thing of all.

Derek pushes himself up off the bed abruptly, getting his feet under him and throwing his arms over his head in a long, slow stretch. When his arms settle back at his sides, he catches Stiles looking abruptly away from the hem of his shirt where it must have ridden up with Derek’s movement.

“You should probably go find Erica,” Derek says, straightening his jacket. Stiles looks abruptly guilty, scrambling up off the bed after Derek.

“Yeah,” he says with an awkward little half-laugh. “Wouldn’t want anyone to think I’ve been neglecting my girlfriend.”

Derek pushes down the little frission of jealousy that shoots up his spine, because it’s stupid. He turns and leads Stiles from the room, looking back to make sure he’s being followed before pushing out into the crowd and letting it swallow him whole.

If he gets massively drunk to kill his feelings with alcohol poisoning and falls off the trellis twice while trying to get back up into his bedroom, nobody’s there to see it.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Derek makes a mistake (a shocking twist, I know) that brings everything to a head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I know these updates have been coming daily and it hasn't been a day yet, but I have to leave on Saturday because we're visiting family for Chrismakkah and I probably will have about zero time to write. So I'm posting two chapters today, and hopefully I can post the last two tomorrow. Enjoy!

On Monday, just before first bell, Stiles is talking to Scott in front of his open locker, and he waves as Derek walks past on his way to Spanish. Derek waves back. Erica, who’s leaning into Stiles’ side, grips the strap of her book bag so hard her knuckles go white, and glares at Derek like he’s just thrown her favorite pair of boots into the river.

It’s only after he sets up at his desk in Spanish, giving one final cursory glance over the verb tenses he’s memorized for this quiz, that he remembers back to that first Tuesday, the week after Homecoming, and he realizes why Erica gave him that look. Remembers saying, “I won’t say hi in the halls. You’re not going to sit with me at lunch,” and silently curses himself out.

Stiles will definitely not be sitting at Derek’s lunch table.

…

It’s Tuesday, and Stiles is sitting at Derek’s lunch table.

Well, he’s not _technically_. He’s just stopping by to drop off the notes Derek shoved into his chest that morning after he heard Stiles’ bio class was about to take their first big unit test of the semester.

He tells Stiles gruffly to “Keep them. Your test isn’t ’til Thursday,” but what Stiles doesn’t know is that the big, slightly smudged _Great job!_ scrawled in the top right corner of the packet he’s holding was written in Kate’s loopy handwriting, with Kate’s favorite green pen, in Kate’s bedroom the first night she let Derek fuck her, and the only reason he never got around to burning it is because he never wanted to touch it again.

But for Stiles, Derek’s pretty sure he’d touch anything.

“Aww, thanks, man,” Stiles says with a wide, shit-eating grin. “I knew you were secretly a nice guy under the Murder Eyebrows and the scowling. Derek Hale, Secret Nice Guy. I bet you even take off the jacket, it’s like your mild mannered alter ego; don’t worry buddy, your secret’s safe with me.”

Derek snorts. “Are you _drunk_ ,” he grumbles through the tater tot he just stole off Boyd’s plate, and watches past a tangled knot of dread and fascination as Stiles breaks out a slow, sly smile.

“I don’t know,” he says, deceptively casual as he leans hipshot against the edge of Derek’s lunch table. “Is this a conversation, or a giraffe?”

Derek resists the urge to poke at Stiles’ offending hip with one finger, instead scowling until Stiles heaves a put-upon sigh and swings around.

“Bye,” he says with a sarcastic wave as he steps away, turning to call out over his shoulder, “And don’t think your Murder Eyebrows can fool me, I’ve seen beneath the mask.” He lopes off to the table he shares with Erica and McCall, both of whom are staring at Stiles like he’s grown a second head, or perhaps a second personality.

Derek is actually wondering the same thing of himself as Boyd looks over and raises one questioning eyebrow.

“It’s nothing,” says Derek, trying to sound like he means it, and when the thoughtful crease forming at the center of Boyd’s forehead eases a little, he thinks he may have succeeded.

…

Stiles waves again the next day, and Derek can’t help but wave back.

Because Derek is an _idiot_.

…

It happens on Thursday.

Derek is lounging under the bleachers, shoulder leaned up against one of the support beams, when Stiles comes sprinting to meet him, throwing himself bodily at Derek when he gets there and forcing Derek to catch him with two awkward hands around his shoulders. Stiles throws long, warm arms around Derek’s chest, and Derek feels like he’s asphyxiating on nothing when Stiles pulls him closer.

“Oh my God, I think I aced my bio test, woot!” Stiles yells directly into Derek’s ear.

“Did you just say ‘woot’ out loud? Non-ironically?” Derek asks, wincing in a combination of pain and distaste.

When Stiles pulls back, it’s a blessing for his eardrum and a vast, vast disappointment for the entire rest of him. Several bits stage a particularly violent protest as his heart tries to tear out of his chest and his dick tries to tear out of his pants, both in a desperate bid to get to Stiles. It’s, all in all, a very uncomfortable experience for Derek’s body as a whole.

Derek loves it. Of course he does.

“I most definitely did, woot is a perfectly viable response to _extreme awesomeness_ ,” Stiles assures him, grinning. “Thanks for the notes,” he adds, his smile turning shy. “I mean, that’s probably what got me through that thing in one piece, so, yeah. Thanks.”

Derek shrugs one awkward shoulder. He’s never been particularly good at accepting compliments.

“So,” says Erica from behind them, and Derek is abruptly glad that he and Stiles have separated to an acceptably platonic distance. “Are we gonna do this thing or what?”

Derek never should have said yes.

…

It’s not a mistake Derek’s ever made before. It’s too cliché. Derek is a fucking rom-com cliché, and it says something very sad when that’s not even the worst part of it.

His eyes are closed, and he’s thinking of Stiles, of his lips and his hands, his fingers, the curve of his nose, the rangy muscles in his legs. Derek can still see him the way he’d looked in the faint sliver of artificial light that crept underneath the closet door at Lydia’s party: all bare skin, freckles everywhere, head thrown back to expose his long, smooth throat, the smell of his come in that hot, enclosed space.

His hands are on Stiles’ hips, jeans under his last two fingers but bare skin beneath his thumbs, the firm bumps of his abs, and Derek slides his hands inward and up, barely registering it when the hairs on the back of his hands rasp up against someone else’s skin. Stiles gasps out when Derek’s right thumb skims his nipple, and his pecs spasm, tightening in hypnotic rhythm under Derek’s palms as he comes.

Derek feels a tight flutter around his cock and hears a third, foreign gasp at his ear, but he can still hear Stiles breathing underneath it all, a steady undercurrent like a heartbeat. So when Derek feels the tightening in his balls, he groans, “Stiles.” And then he comes.

In the silence afterward, his eyes snap open to meet two sets of equally stunned eyes staring back.

Fuck his _life_.

Stiles backs up quickly, stumbling as he tries to walk backwards while pulling his shirt down from where Derek had it hiked right up under his armpits. He tucks his dick away and says, fumblingly, “I… I have to go.” And then he’s gone.

“ _Fuck,_ ” Derek says, letting his head fall back against the metal bleachers with a clang.

Erica only says, “Huh,” and leans back against the bleachers beside him.

“What,” Derek asks flatly, pulling a tired hand down his face.

“Well, it’s just… I mean, I expected that from _Stiles_. His crush is so completely _obvious_ , he might as well invest in a big neon sign and glue it to his forehead.”

This is news to Derek. Horrible, horrible news. Derek and self-restraint don’t have a good track record together as it is, and knowing Stiles _wants him…_

He’s _screwed_.

“I mean, with you, I had literally _no idea_ ,” she says, sounding vaguely dismayed with her own lack of foresight. “I didn’t read you right _at all_.”

Derek shrugs one shoulder. He doesn’t really know what else to say.

“Well,” Erica says, an air of finality to the set of her shoulders as she brushes her hands together like she’s brushing away the past month and everything that’s happened since that first time under these same bleachers. She pushes herself up to stand tall in front of him. “Good luck,” she adds, giving Derek a sad, wry little half-smile. Derek thinks it’s the first real, unscripted expression he’s ever seen on her face.

It’s pretty.

“Yeah,” Derek says, nodding, because he figures maybe he does owe something to Erica. Maybe he owed her something all along. Maybe he never looked at her close enough to see it.

Maybe he never wanted to.

“You, too,” Derek says, and he means it.

…

Stiles catches him before school the next day. They’re in a relatively deserted hallway, a little-used shortcut from Derek’s locker to his Spanish class, when Stiles pops up in front of him, seemingly out of nowhere.

“Hey, Derek,” he says breathlessly. “Hey. So. This is kind of awkward, but, ahhh…” he trails off, rubbing nervously at the back of his head. “So, I, ah, I don’t think I’m gonna be able to…” he makes a vague gesture that really looks nothing remotely like it could mean ‘fucking’ or any of its derivatives, “ _y’know_ … anymore, with you and Erica. We—Erica and I—we kind of… broke up? Because, well, I thought I liked her, like, maybe a lot, and that’s why I went along with the whole… thing… with you, and her, and. And me.

“And then it kept happening, and I kept letting it. See, I mean, I thought I was going crazy or something, or that I was maybe more masochistic than I thought? Because I… Jesus, this is embarrassing, but I guess I liked it… a lot… more than I thought I should have. But really this thing has just been my Big Gay—well, Bi—Freak Out, and dude, I was so relieved! I mean, when you said my name, I was like, ‘ohhhhh. Shit. SO I guess there’s that now.’ And anyway, this whole thing seemed kind of less appealing now that I know about… all that. Because Erica… well, she was kind of not the important part of the equation, if you… know what I mean,” he finishes weakly, wincing and shifting his feet.

Derek is silent for a moment. Then he asks, slowly, “You’re just realizing this now?”

“I,” Stiles falters and stares up at him, brown eyes wide. “Did you… You knew all along?”

“I,” Derek says, and curses himself when he falters, too. “No. Not about you.”

“Not about—what—” if Derek had thought it impossible for Stiles’ eyes to widen any further, he’d obviously been underestimating Stiles’ abilities. “ _No,_ ” he says, incredulous, eyebrows jumping. “You’re messing with me. You— _no._ ”

Derek presses the fingers of one hand to his forehead and sighs. “Why the _fuck_ else would I have said your name, Stiles,” he says tiredly, and it’s not really a question at all. The answer is a foregone conclusion.

“Wait, really?” Stiles asks, voice still raised on the sharp edge of disbelief. When Derek sighs, exasperated, and nods, Stiles starts bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet like an excited _idiot_. Because that’s what they both are, clearly. “I thought that was just some freak accident. This is awesome, though; you like me, and I obviously like you because I, like, just told you, so—”

“No,” Derek says abruptly, because he knows where this conversation is going, and he’s already _so tired of it_. How had he ever thought any of this would be _easy?_

 _Had_ he thought any of this would be easy? Or was that just another fucking lie he’d told himself?

“Wh… why not?” Stiles asks, smile falling, feet stilling, and Derek wants to _punch himself in the face_ for the look he just put on Stiles’.

“It’s just _not happening_ , Stiles,” Derek says, voice sharp. “Let it go.” He needs to get out of here, needs to tear off the fucking Band-Aid, and suffer through the sting until new skin grows in to replace what’s gone. Needs to do that for Stiles, too, make this as clean a break as possible so he isn’t left feeling the phantom ache of regret for the rest of his life. So he doesn’t end up like Derek.

“Are you… are you _fucking_ kidding me?” Stiles asks, and this time when his voice rises, Derek knows it’s anger that lifts it. That’s good. Anger will make him strong, will let him burn through this and come out unbroken on the other side.

“Does this look like the face of someone who’s kidding?”

“No,” Stiles says with a sharp shake of the head. “No, actually, it looks like the face of a contrary _dickhead_. Seriously, man, what gives?”

Derek laughs hollowly, and Stiles’ flinch makes his intestines feel like they’ve been ripped right down out of him and thrown to the floor at his feet, like someone’s knifed him in the stomach, and it only firms his resolve. “Look what I’ve already done to you.”

Stiles glares at him and takes one furious step forward. “ _Don’t_ , okay? Don’t turn me into some kind of martyr, here, I… I think I liked _having_ a girlfriend more than I liked my actual girlfriend, so. No saints here,” he says, and the hitch in his voice sounds guilty as hell. “I’m actually kind of an asshole, and—I’m pretty sure you must have noticed this at some point, because you’re not _actually_ a hopeless moron no matter how you act sometimes—but, news flash, buddy: so are you.”

“Stiles,” Derek says, quietly, but Stiles talks over him.

“No. Let me finish.” He takes a deep breath, lets it out slow. “Basically we’re all morally bankrupt, here. None of the banks contain morals, and neither do the people; it’s just a Rare Earth Material, okay, or maybe Scott just took it all for himself, the world may never know. But the point is, I’m not going to let you cast me as the victim. My eyes were wide open, man.”

“Stiles, I—” Derek starts, but the bell cuts him off as it sounds loudly over the speaker system, and he turns away abruptly. “I have to go to class.”

He rushes off down the hallway to merge with the crowds flowing through the more populous corridors, leaving Stiles standing open-mouthed behind him, and he doesn’t look back because he doesn’t trust himself not to retrace his steps at a sprint and tackle Stiles to the ground so he can kiss him and kiss him and never stop.

Derek is Bad News, a hot mess, and he _knows_ that—knew it coming into this, from the very start—but he let himself fall too far anyway. He doesn't  _want_  to hurt Stiles, doesn't  _want_  to leave him crying alone on the bleachers after Prom like all the Bad News boys in the movies, but Derek doesn't know how to be anything else.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one where Derek’s family is awesome.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is so so so so so late, I know. There are no excuses. I’m sorry. But, here you go, hope you like it.

As promised, Laura comes home for the weekend. 

“Hey, Der Bear,” she says, flopping down at the foot of his bed. “I hear you’re the resident scarlet letter of Beacon Hills High.”

Derek glances up over the top of his Econ book, and tries to smother the stab of guilt that hits beneath his ribcage when he sees the wry smile on her face. Last week was the first of Laura’s entire college career that Derek ignored her Skype call—for this very reason—and he’s not proud of it. He should know by now not to delay the inevitable, but he’s so used to ignoring the things he doesn’t want to face. Derek and foresight are about as good of friends as Derek and self-restraint.

He casts his eyes back down toward Chapter 3 and gets through two sentences before realizing he has no idea what it’s about. So he sets the book aside and slumps back against the headboard, breathing deep to steel himself as he turns to face the music.

“Hi, Laura,” he says, and figures it’s as good a start as any.

Laura fixes him with knowing eyes, and he fidgets under her gaze. Laura and Mom are the only people in the world who can still do that to Derek with just one look—can make him squirm with guilt like the four year old he’d once been, when they’d found him sitting cross-legged on the rug, drawing on Cora’s nursery wall with red and brown crayons.

Derek hates that look, but he figures he probably deserves it.

He forces his body to still, settling back into the headboard, and prepares himself for a soliloquy, some sort of grand speech about respect and responsibility, a judgment from on high—but eventually Laura’s gaze softens and she sighs. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t—” Derek begins, but Laura isn’t finished.

“I mean, there must be something. This just… It doesn’t sound like you, Der,” she says, and when his eyes dart up to meet hers, the only thing he sees is concern, and it’s like a punch to the solar plexus. That imploring look just stokes the fire of guilt that’s been flooding in a constant dull roar through his veins for so long he doesn’t really remember what it feels like to breath easy. He looks at Laura and the accident flashes at the back of his mind, her wide eyes overlaying Paige’s, and he feels like this time it’s his chest that hit the steering column.

“I… it’s not like Cora tells it,” is what Derek says, and he can barely force the words out, past the feeling in his throat like he’s choking. “It’s much worse,” is what he doesn’t say.

He knows he sounds like he’s begging, but he can’t help it.

“What’s really going on, Derek?” Laura asks, reaching over to rest a warm palm over his knee. Her fingers are warm and familiar where they dig into his thigh just slightly, comforting even though she’s holding on a little too tight—like he’s falling apart and she’s trying to hold him together through this one point of contact.

“If I tell you something, do you promise not to tell anyone else?” Derek asks, words barely more than a gust of breath, and his eyes flick up to her face before darting away just as quickly.

“Sure,” Laura says, nodding, and Derek feels all the nervous energy bleed out of him between one breath and the next.

Still, he inhales slowly again to brace himself. “It’s not… It’s not just me and Erica,” he begins, and then stops abruptly, blowing a loud breath out through his mouth as he tries to collect his thoughts. “It’s me and Erica _and_ Stiles, it’s… it’s all three of us—”

“Oh,” she whispers, eyes widening, and Derek’s not sure Laura realizes she made a sound at all.

“We’ve all been—”

“Woah,” Laura says, cutting him off, and pulls her hand back abruptly. “Okay, yeah, that’s… I get it. I definitely get it, and I’m not, um—this isn’t me judging you. I’m really not, but remember when you were walking upstairs and saw me and Justin—”

“Oh, _God_ ,” Derek groans, hiding his furious blush behind both hands. Laura’s fingers give his shoulder a quick, fortifying nudge, and she huffs a rueful little laugh.

“Yeah. So, um, you understand why I don’t really want all the sordid details, here.” Derek winces as he nods, and when her hand returns to his knee, she gives it a gentle squeeze that he can’t help pushing up into. Derek’s a tactile person by nature, but it’s not something he gives many people an opportunity to see. “Huh. This is a bit of a mess, isn’t it, little brother,” Laura says with a sad, wry smile.

Derek stares down at a loose thread in his comforter for a moment before letting out a short, pained breath and nodding miserably.

“So you’re probably pretty tired of being the third wheel, huh?” she asks sympathetically, and Derek winces again, holding his breath as he glances up at her and slowly shakes his head.

“No, I… that’s not the problem, really.”

“I—” Laura cuts herself off, confused. “I don’t get it,” she says, and her mouth turns down at the corners.

“Laura, I… I really like him,” Derek admits, voice hoarse, and it’s strange to finally say it out loud, strange because it doesn’t really change anything, doesn’t feel any different, even if Derek thought maybe it should.

It makes sense, though. The sentiment wasn’t any less true before he voiced it.

He looks back up, ready to face her head-on now, but when her face comes into view Derek feels his heart stutter a little in his chest, a painful missed beat, because Laura looks _gutted_.

“Oh. Oh, shit. _Bear_ ,” she murmurs.

“It’s okay,” Derek says, halting and confused. “I’m fine.”

Laura’s mouth twists down further, as though the misery is hers. “Come here,” she says softly, and scrambles across the comforter to get closer to him, pulling him away from the headboard and into her side. “This sucks,” she says, and he can hear the frown still lingering in her voice. Her arms tighten around him, one hand on his back, the other moving to card through his hair and pressing him in until his face is buried in the crook of her neck: bundling him up in her arms like she used to when he came stumbling into her room crying in the terrible wake of a nightmare, unable to find sleep in the cold loneliness of his own bed. “Shit, Derek.” Her nails scritch in the short hairs at the nape of his neck. “You know no one will care, right? Me, and Mom, and Patrick and Cora—Uncle Peter, even—they won’t care. And obviously our little cousins won’t…”

Derek is already shaking his head against her shoulder, and she trails off, pulling back until she can see his face. Her hand doesn’t move away from his hair.

“What?” she asks softly, still petting at the back of his head.

“It’s not—it’s not about that,” he says, slowly, and she fixes him with a worried, dubious look, like she doesn’t quite believe him.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” Derek says, and he nods again, more firmly this time.

“Okay,” Laura says, backing off a little, and her hand finally falls away as she shifts toward the center of the bed and fixes him with an understanding, attentive look. “What is it, then?"

“It’s… well… I like him.”

“You said that already,” Laura reminds him patiently, and he forces a loud, frustrated breath out his nose.

“I know I did, because that’s the _problem_.”

Now Laura just looks confused again, a little wrinkle forming between her eyebrows. Derek wants to bash his head against the bedpost because he’s never been good with words, he’s never known what to say to make people _understand_. “I thought you just said it wasn’t?”

“It’s… not the whole… me being bi thing,” he says, waving a dismissive hand, and Laura snorts a little before a new understanding lights her eyes.

“Is he straight?” she asks, bracingly, and Derek makes a frustrated noise in the back of his throat, shaking his head again.

He pulls a hand through his hair and doesn’t bother hiding the sudden unhappy twist to his mouth. “It’s not that either. It’s just… I don’t… I’m not good for him,” he finally blurts out, letting his head fall until his chin settles against his chest. He crosses his arms and tries not to look like he’s hugging himself; judging by the distressed noise Laura makes, he doesn’t think he’s succeeded.

Laura knows immediately when something is wrong, can smell something off about Derek from miles away, like a shark scenting blood in the water. But she’ll never understand the way he views himself—the dark, angry, hateful face he sees when he looks in the mirror, the black layer of rot lurking just under the surface.

“God, Derek,” she whispers, and the gutted look is back to burn him anew. He wants to close his eyes, wants to shy away from it, but it’s no more than he deserves.

He deserves this look Laura is giving him, but she doesn’t deserve to wear it. The pain in her eyes isn’t hers to hold onto. She can’t see him the way he sees himself because she doesn’t have the right lens to look through, isn’t plagued by the burden of shouldered guilt that weighs Derek down into a place from which the darkness inside himself is visible.

Because in the end, Laura will never understand. She doesn’t know the full extent of what Kate did. Derek knows the weight of Kate’s weapon, has carried the scars it leaves, and he never wants to pass them on, like some dark mantle—never wants to look down and realize there’s blood on his hands, another person lying wrecked at his feet because he decided to be selfish. To take what he doesn’t deserve.

“That’s such bullshit,” Laura finally chokes out, and she looks lost and regretful and _furious_ , which Derek doesn’t really understand. “You think you don’t deserve him but that’s bullshit.”

Derek shrugs one shoulder and turns away, because he’s _so tired_ , of this conversation, of this situation: of dragging these old skeletons out of the closet and into the light where everyone can see them, as though it’s not enough to be haunted in private by their lingering ghosts.

After a moment, Laura sighs and leans close to rest her head on his shoulder, and he props his own head on top of hers, feeling the short hairs behind her ear tickle against his jaw and taking comfort where he can.

…

Patrick knows about it, or at least some of it, but he doesn’t ask, doesn’t offer comfort or advice. He just invites Derek to watch a true crime show with him on the big living room TV and they stay up until two in the morning throwing popcorn at each other and placing bets on the real murderer. Derek ends up with dish duty tomorrow night and Patrick will be doing his laundry in the morning, and they fall asleep before they can see who wins a get-out-of-trash-duty-free card.

The next day, Derek looks up the verdict of the last, half-finished episode on the internet and then promptly pretends he didn’t. What Patrick doesn’t know can’t hurt him.

…

On Monday, Derek walks through the double doors, only to be confronted with the sight of Stiles standing by Scott’s locker, their heads bent close together. He has to physically run in the opposite direction to keep from throwing himself prostrate at Stiles’ feet and begging forgiveness, because Stiles looks _rough_. Stiles looks a little like he spent three sleepless nights pacing around his bedroom, probably only stopping to kick out at his furniture in miserable rage while pretending he was really kicking Derek in the face.

Derek is a horrible person. It’s a good thing he came to terms with that years ago, or he might be facing a complete mental breakdown now in the face of Stiles’ abject misery, under the knowledge that it’s all his fault.

As it is, Derek is about three of Stiles’ miserable-glances-disguised-as-glares away from tearing all his hair out by the roots. Including his body hair.

Because he would deserve it.

Laura has gone back to Berkeley because the weekend is over, and she won’t be coming home until Friday to help set up for Halloween and the haunted house. So Derek goes to Cora’s room instead, and throws himself facedown on the mattress by her feet. He stares morosely at her socks, which are pink and have little gray wolves on them. Cora is such a dork.

He decides to tell her so. “You are such a dork,” he informs Cora’s socks, and she huffs.

“What does that make you?” she asks, and from the halfhearted kick she directs at his shoulder, he can tell she’s still unhappy with him for the thing with Stiles and Erica, even though Derek’s pretty sure Laura already told her the whole sordid story.

Derek wants to tell her to take off those socks if she’s planning on kicking him to death, just so the poor innocent wolves won’t be implicated in his murder, but he recognizes that for the evasion it is. Instead, he makes himself answer her question. “I… am an _idiot_.” He turns his face into her comforter and forces his pitiful moan back into his chest where it came from, before it can slip out and give him away. 

Cora sends him a patronizing glance before looking back down at her phone. “I’m glad you’ve finally caught on.”

“I fucked up,” Derek continues, and he doesn’t have to pull his face out of her bedding to know Cora’s nodding.

“Also not news to me,” she says, and nudges him again with her foot, although this time it’s gentler, almost playful. Derek swats at her ankle.

“I’m in love with Stiles,” he adds, and it still doesn’t feel different, saying it out loud, but he’s hoping for some kind of response—surprise, shock, disbelief—when Cora hears it.

“Yep, knew that one, too,” she says, and Derek is the one who jerks up from his faceplant in surprise, shock, disbelief.

“What? _How?_ ”

Cora rolls her eyes without even glancing up from her phone long enough to direct them his way. “You _waved_ to him, Derek,” she says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “In _public_. You don’t even wave to _me_.”

So maybe it is pretty obvious. 

Derek shoves his face back in Cora’s mattress and tries to tell himself he’s not hiding. “I can’t believe I let myself—” he begins, and Cora cuts him off with a particularly vicious kick. Obviously, she’s not thinking of the poor wolves and the trauma of being unwitting accomplices to such violence.

“ _What?_ ” she says, incredulous. “No! Derek. The problem… is not that you’re in love with him.” Her voice is slow and patient, the same voice she might use when explaining something to a particularly dense five year old. Derek resents that. “The problem… is that you were a dick to him… _despite being in love with him_.”

“Exactly,” Derek says, darkly, and Cora heaves a loud, exasperated sigh, kicking him right off the side of the bed and bashing one of the wolves’ heads directly into the bone of his hip in the process. Because she is a horrible person, with no sympathy for the sad writhing antelope felled by lions on Animal Planet, and none for the tiny cross-stitched wolves on her feet, and none for Derek in his pathetic lovelorn plight.

“Come back when you get your head out of your ass,” she tells him nastily, before glancing back down at her phone, “and don’t forget to shut the door on your way out.”

… 

It was inevitable, really. Derek hasn’t gone this long without having sex in a while, and he may technically be an adult now, with a real, DMV-issued ID to prove it, but he’s still a teenager.

He shoves his sheets and pajamas haphazardly into the washing machine, catching the corner of his blanket in the door twice before he manages to shove everything in and shut it properly. He hops up to sit on the lid while the machine rumbles to life beneath him, a steady vibration that travels down through his legs and up into his skull, and he wishes the humming would rattle the thoughts right out of his head so he doesn’t have to think anymore, if only for as long as the rinse cycle lasts.

His control is good enough by now that he’s pretty sure he could have gone a year without having sex and not endured the embarrassment of a single wet dream before he saw Stiles naked.

Stiles has ruined him for fucking everyone, and they’ve never even touched each other’s dicks. He feels like he’s been cheated, but Mom did always tell him what goes around comes back around, and he’s played a part in his fair share of cheating lately.

“Derek?”

His head darts up as Mom’s voice drifts softly from the door to the laundry room. At the sight of her soft, knowing smile, heat blooms high in his cheeks. He grimaces and turns his face toward the wall at his side, embarrassed, until she steps in to card gentle fingers through his bangs where they spike up over his forehead.

“Hey, Baby Bear,” she murmurs, and her fingertips trail all the way back to the crown of his head. “I talked to Laura,” she adds, gently, and his eyes dart up to meet hers. Her face is soft and open, her gaze clear but for a bare hint of sorrow around the edges.

He slumps into the wall at his back, suddenly tired down to his bones, and stares at the white top of the washing machine where it’s visible between his knees.

“No one blames you, you know,” she says, fingers still brushing lightly over the top of his head. “Papa wouldn’t have blamed you either.”

“How do you _know_?” Derek asks, voice cracking like a veneer of ice over a pond, thinner underfoot than it appears from the banks. He sounds desperate, he knows he does, but he can’t bring himself to care.

“You’re his baby. Our baby. He loved you. _So much._ He didn’t want this for you, didn’t want you to spend the rest of your life carrying this around. Not on his account, and not on yours.” Derek takes a sharp, short breath, closing his eyes tight against the world, against himself, and Mom’s palm presses more firmly into the base of his skull, drawing him close into her shoulder. “C’mere cutie. I love you.”

“How can you? I killed him.”

“You did _not_ kill your father,” Mom says, and her voice is sharp even as her hand remains gentle on the back of his head.

“I’m the reason he’s dead,” Derek whispers, and he can barely make the words come out.

“Kate hurt you first,” Mom says, just as softly.

“I let the wolf in." 

“Oh, Derek,” Mom whispers, and hums in quiet dissent. “Maybe you didn’t let her get to us. Maybe _we_ let her get to _you_. We tried to make everything seem normal, after—after Paige… But we should have seen. That’s not what you needed. We should have noticed what was happening to _you_ , because looking back it was… _so_ obvious. We were supposed to protect you,” she says.

The waver in her voice makes Derek want to throw up. He doesn’t know what he’d do if he made Mom cry for real.

“But then I think…” she continues, slowly, as though fortifying herself, “maybe we could have done all that and it still would have happened. And you can’t beat yourself up about this forever, Derek, because maybe you could have never looked twice at her and she’d still have found another way to do it in the end.”

“But if I hadn’t—”

“There are things we all could have done,” Mom cuts him off, voice firm. “But in the end, Kate’s the only one who could have changed things for sure. She killed Papa. Just her. Putting the blame on anyone else just feels like letting her off the hook. We can’t let her win like that." 

And that’s not something Derek’s ever really considered. But it dawns on him all at once, like falling through ice and into the dark, freezing waters beneath, that this was Kate’s game all along. That she wanted to take him and burn him and warp him into someone incapable of loving himself, twisted with grief and so scared of hurting someone else that he turned his sharp edges in towards his own heart. And Derek pushing everyone away, pushing Stiles away—his unwillingness to let anyone make him happy—is her pièce de résistance.

As Derek leans into Mom’s arms, breathing fast and hard into her neck, letting her run gentle fingers through his hair over and over again despite the way her wedding ring catches and sometimes pulls, he decides he can’t let Kate win. She took his father away from them, and he’ll be dead before he lets her take him, too.

“I’m sorry, Mom, I’m sorry,” he whispers against her collarbone, and she shushes him, rocking him a little back and forth.

“Little Bear,” she murmurs, breath coming soft near the shell of his ear, “there was never anything to be sorry for.”


End file.
